MENTAL ILLNESS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5130, 25 May 1927, Page 3

MENTAL ILLNESS.

SPEEDING UP MEDICAL .B’ll DIES.

APPEAL BY PRINCE |OF WALES.

“ One of the terrible legacies left us by the war,” said the Prince of Wales at a meeting of the Mental After Care Association at the Mansion House, London, “is the care of a large number of men whose health has been impaired, though not by wounds or by disease: men whosedisability was not physical but mental.”

“ The urgent need for helping such cases,; which were often far sadder than those of men who had actually lost a limb, has had two results. It has led the medical profession to “speed up” its stmiv of mental infirmity generally, so that that particular branch of medical science has made, very marked ptogress; and, further, it has brought home to all of us that mental Double, is generally speaking, just as much a disease as any of the physical illnesses with which we are all familiar.

“Moreover ,it has taught us—l arn speaking of the community generally —to think much more o' tnat aspect of the mental problem which has of recent years come into such prominence ; I mean the rekit ion of mental disease to crime, and the consequent danger to the Stale if mental patients are not properly helped to regain their normal health.” As patron of the association i:e asked, that the same measure of generosity shown for the healing of the physically Infirm should be accorded the mentally infirm.

Dr. R. Percy Smith announced that as the result of the Prince of Wales’s appeal, supplemented by Sir Charles Wakefield’s broadcast appeal, £8136 had been obtained.