THE FEEBLE-MINDED.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 192, 12 February 1914, Page 5

THE FEEBLE-MINDED.

SUfiOESTIOXS FOR TREATMENT. By Telegraph—Press Association. Auckland, Last Night. Thirc was presented to the Medical Congress to-day a report of a committee appointed in 1011 to investigate the prevalence of feeble-mindedness hi Australasia, to educate the public and to promote a popular campaign dealing with the same.

The report gives tabulated statements regarding the position in each State, and indicates that a rough total of four per cent. 0. the children are definitely feeble-minded, and three times tiiat number are mentally dull, and require special training. The census taken reveals a grave prevalence Df hereditary mental defects calling for legislative action, and provision for the exceptional fertility of the feeble-mind-ed is referred to at length. To avert the very serious evil of propagation of this undesirable species (says the report), as well as to prevent the disastrous consequences to the feeble-minded themselves of untramelled and incompetent liberty, some legislation enabling institutions under due legal safeguards to deal with urgent, cases is required. The sexual instinct, in particular, is apt to be utterly uncontrolled in feebleminded persons, and the results need no reiteration. Undoubtedly a very large proportion »f our habitual criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and wastrels, arc really feeble-minded, and if money were, spent in preventing hy detention instead of making futile endeavors to cure by imprisonment and fine, 'this mass of vice and squalor it would be more happily employed and would go farther. The committee was of opinion th.it the following is, in general terms, the direction which legislation to provide for the feeble-minded should take: (1) Day schools in large centres to train all children reasonably suspected of mental defect. These will eliminate children wrongly classed as such, and qualify them for further education through the o/dinary channels; (2) residential schools for children of tli* same doubtful class from scattered districts, and for children definitely judged to be mentally defective; (3) in connection with the' residential schools to some extent,

and probably also, by preference, in separate country localities, residential colonies, with the separation of the sexes, for the permanent care of f hp feeble-minded on attaining adnlt age, when not of so low a grade as to■ call for confinement in such institutions as idiot asylums.