OUR INSANITY STATISTICS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 34, 22 August 1907, Page 12

OUR INSANITY STATISTICS

UNRELIABLE TABLES In dealing with the Irish question, the ' Auckland Herald ' goes beyond the limits of its ken, as we have pointed out elsewhere. On non-party questions nearer home to it, its information is generally far more extensive and trustworthy. In its issue of August 14, for instance, it has the following timely and well-balanced editorial comments on the statistics cf insanity recently published for New 'Zealand :—: — lln spite of the many duties of Departmental officials they frequently find time to work out a host of tables and percentages which find place in our Parliamentary papers. Some of these are exceedingly instructive, and they are almost always interesting. It would therefore be unwise to discourage the practice... But it is evidently necessary that some check should be established over the figurings of officials who have not the statistician mind and whose tables ought therefore to be corrected before official publication- by some one who has. Better organised colonies have such a check ; all tables being issued from a statis- • tician's office where it has been established upon modern lines. As an instance of bad figure work — and there are innumerable instances in many Departmental reports—we may well take that by which Dr. Hay considers it is proved " that the English were practically twice as liable to insanity here as on their own soil, the Scotch two and a-qwarter times more liable, and ,the Irish two and three-quarter times more." He also theorises that there is in comparison ' ' a remarkably low incidence of insanity among New _ Zealand-bjorn, " and offers a r host of figures to show' that our native-born insane only cost the Colony Is 4fd per head, while the English lot cost ,6s Hd, the iScotch 6s ll|d, and the Irish 12s 7^d. The point that will at once occur to any competent critic, ami that would have been put forward art once by a statistician, is that the relative ages of the native-born and the immigrants— which is a vital factor in insanity tables— has been completely ignored. There are proportionately very roaoiy more children in the Old Country than are brought here by immigration ; there are enormously more children among our •native-born

, population than among our British-born population', am! children are comparatively immune from insanity. We may well hope "that our superior conditions may nuke us a healthy people in every way, but it is rather ridiculous for Departmental papers to contain official tables which are quite unreliable, because based upon a partial and not a complete statement of the case. Which is why all such tabulations should be submitted before publication to an expert in the im- ', poitant science of statistics.'