“BORDERLINE” CASES

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 138, 1 September 1927, Page 18

“BORDERLINE” CASES

CARE OF MENTAL PATIENTS VALUE OF EARLY TREATMENT (THE SUN’S Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, Wednesday. The care which the Health Department is taking of the “half-way” mental cases is lucidly outlined in the report of this phase of the department s activities, which was presented to Parliament to-day. “The special neuropathic hospitals for care and treatment of incipient recent and recoverable cases, as projected, have been completed and occupied at Porirua and Hornby, and similar institutions at Auckland and Seacliff are ready for occupation.” it says.

* our of these home-like sanatoria have been built and equipped. These are situated in a separate district, some miles away from the main institution, and have no suggestion of association with it, either in name or locality.

“At Auckland it was impossible to locate the sanatorium far from the mam buildings, but it is placed on the opposite side of the road. A quickly growing, effective shelter-belt, purposely planted the previous year, and already about six feet high, will entirely screen off the new buildings in the course of the next six months; and the undulating, well-laid-out and wellplanted garden-grounds will soon be very attractive,

“As this sanatorium stands on relatively high ground, commanding an extensive view across five or six miles of picturesque, open country, backed by Mount Eden and the heights of the city, it supplies all that can be desired m the way of a temporary residence for the more sensitive and curable women patients.”

The report shows that the number of patients under care in the mental hospitals during the year was 6,204and there were 6.467 on the register at the end of the year, being an increase of 336, made up of 171 males and 165 females. The death-rate for 1926 has been about the average—viz.. 324 out of a total of 6,006 patients, or 5.2 per cent.

“It may be assumed,” the report says, that the 30 per cent, of recoveries recorded during the year for the Dominion is fairly satisfactory, and truly represents at least as high a standard of success as obtains in other comparable English-speaking countries.

“All changes and reforms demand time. The widespread popular prejudice against resorting to institutions for the care and treatment of persons suffering from mental breakdown, until they have become positively dangerous or unmanageable, cannot be overcome, in New Zealand or anywhere else, until the public has been brought to realise that early competent treatment in special institutions is more imperatively necessary in the case of incipient mental disease than in any other form of illness.”