OVERCROWDED ASYLUM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1087, 28 December 1911, Page 3

OVERCROWDED ASYLUM.

Auckland, Dec. 26

Mr Ewington, official visitor to the Mental Hospital, reporting to the Government on the overcrowded state ol the institution says: “1 wish the Minister for the Department, with representatives of the Auckland daily press, to accompany me over the Mental Hospital any night at, say, 12 o’clock, and witness a scene of horror, consequent on the absolutely deplorable overcrowding, liven then they could not lully realise all. . . . The patients’ beds are laid on the floor in the passages against the attendants’ bedroom uuors, and the smell is repelling. The attendants have every night to lift the tables and chairs out of the reading room to make up a good many shakedowns on the floor. Altogether there are about filty-slx shakedowns on the floors in the passages and elsewhere. A current of cold air runs along the passages, and we might ask ourselves how we would like to be put to bed under such circumstances, or how we would like to know that while we enjoy a good bed at home our wife, mother or father are forced to lie on the floor in a passage, such as is the case in the Mental Hospital.” Mr Ewington urgently and solemnly appeals to the Government to act promptly and adequately in the matter.