"WORRY” CLINICS FOR ILLNESS OF MIND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 277, 23 November 1936, Page 11

"WORRY” CLINICS FOR ILLNESS OF MIND

STIGMA THAT SHOULD NOT NOW EXIST IS STILL HERE The establishment of “Worry Clinics,” to which the mentally sick could go for advice and treatment in the early stages of their troubles and thus be saved from insanity, is suggested by Dr. A. H. Martin, Director of the Industrial Institute of Psychology at Sydney. The number of residents in State mental hospitals rose by 200 during the year ended June 30 compared with the previous 12 months when 10,690 were treated, according to the annual report of the Inspector-Gen-eral for the Insane (Dr. Wallace). Nearly every year for the past 20 years there has been an increase in the numbers of mental patients. Suggesting the depression and the increase in the adult population as two possible causes for the increase, Dr. Martin declared that it was essential that steps should be taken in Sydney to help persons before they did become insane. If the whole matter were taken in hand on those lines, he added, it would have the effect of lessening the number of those who ultimately become insane and entered mental hospitals. “We must get people who show the least sign of mental illness to go to a clinic for treatment,” he said. “The difficulty to-day is that there is a stigma attached to mental illness. “We don’t despise the cripple, and yet we have nothing but contempt for the mental cripple. We use expressions like ‘bats in the blefry’ and ‘rats’ to show how we feel towards those unfortunates. That is why people will dread to go to a clinic lor treatment, nowadays. Instead of sympathy, they get contempt from their fellow-men. Proper Treatment “With my idea we would get rid of a lot of the stigma attached to mental illness and at the same time offer proper treatment to a large number of persons if we established worry clinics. There they would be given every help by psycho-therapists and psychologists, and if their mental illness had reached such a stage as to place them beyond the scope of treatment at the clinics they could be advised to go to a psychiatrist and then to a mental hospital. “So many persons would not go insane if they were treated in the early stages,” declared Dr. Martin. “We should have at least two or three worry clinics in Sydney alone.”