MENTAL TROUBLE

Hokitika Guardian, 27 August 1920, Page 4

MENTAL TROUBLE

DR HAY’S COMMENTS

WELLINGTON, Aug. ‘25. Dr Hay’s report on mental hospitals states that last year 883 patients were admitted and 779 were discharged or died. Thus 104 were added to the mentally defeetiye population, or 101 to the mental hospitals, for three were transferred from mental hospitals to private care as single patients. In the course of a lengthy dissertation on the causes of mental trouble, Dr Hay says: “We cannot insure ourselves or carry a charm against the onset of mental disorder, but for those with a bad heredity to sit with folded arms awaiting the stroke of doom argues an extraordinary pusillanimity or an ignorance, a guilty ignorance, of the value of a proper environment. The lawmakers of Erewhon were not altogether absurd when they classed illness as a crime. Perhaps never before was there so general a mental stress operating insidiously and predisposing to mental, moral, and nervous disorders as there is at present, and as there are so many persons blind to their own needs, there was never a greater need for directing and safeguarding the health of the community.” One paragraph from Dr Hay’s interesting report will perhaps repay thoughtful perusal at the present time. “With no prophetic gift,” he says, “but as an ordinary deduction, I stated that the war would reduce the ratio of insanity, and now that the effect of this period of high purpose and genuine altruism seems to be exhausting itself, there is a danger of losing our ethical values, and the ordinary stresses which lead to mental disorder will meet with less resistance when the individual, taken at a disadvantage, is attempting to adjust himself to an environment apparently slipping on its foundations. The war, in a measure the consequence of a general lialf-reasoneil sense of revolt, by the very magnitude of its disastrous upheavals, compelled a consideration of the world sickness, and this has led to a helter-skelter rush for remedies. It has disclosed to many for the first time that the pervading unrest whatever its origin was, is tending to make mankind depart From aspirations for a high and attainable ideal in which the happiness of the individual is merged in the well-being of the whole community. Though it may not be apparent to the individual, the general condition induced is one of mental perplexity, of moral fitfulness, and emotional hunger, and predisposes to nervous disorder and a pervision of ethical standards. There are abundant signs of a sense of chafing under irksome restrictions, without consideration whether their complete removal would mean interference with the liberty of others, of a call for self-expression, good, had, or indifferent, of a desire for self-grati-fication in the enjoyment of tile present, and a discarding of precedents, all pointing to an iconoclastic attack on old conventions, as such, with no thought of their origin and value to the community, or their adaptation and moulding to necessary changes. It is such straining for expression in the midst of revolt which gives us the cubist and the futurist essaying to replace the masterpiece of art which accounts for innocent young women joining recklessly in dances, the meaning and source of which could hardly be referred to in a smoking-room, which draws inspiration for its literary romances from a pathlolgical text hook.”