THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1907. MENTAL HOSPITALS AND ATTENDANTS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8862, 23 October 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1907. MENTAL HOSPITALS AND ATTENDANTS.

The decision of the Wellington Hospital Committee to agree to the proposal made by the Government that nurses in mental hospitals should be allowed to undergo a course of training in the Wellington general hospital is gratifying, and it is to be hoped that the same course will be adopted by all the Hospital Boards of the Dominion. No section of the community has greater claims upon the consideration of the authorities and of humanity generally than those whom society finds it necessary to confine within the walls of a mental hospital, and it is essential that the nurses should be skilled in the treatment of the bodily as well as the mental derangements of the insane. The step which has just been decided upon is but one of many which must be taken before the authorities can say they have done the best possible for the treatment of the mentally afflicted. There should be as complete a system of classification as possible, so that the curable and incurable should in no case be kept together, and the mental hospitals should be under the control only of specialists of the highest skill in the treatment of mental diseases that money can procure. Further, every attendant upon the inmates of i.n asylum should undergo a test as to his or her fitness for the position, and the examination ought to embrace, amongst other things, tact and temperament. It is only the patient who knows what he suffers from the treatment of the impatient airl sometimes, perhaps, brutal attendant; but he has no remedy, because, however sanely ho may bring the matter before the authorities, little credence is given to his plaint. Men and women possesssing infinite patience and sympathetic souls, as well as skill in dealing with mental sufferers, alone should be permitted to fill the position of attendants, and f.hese should be well paid and not be overworked, for the position is a trying one. At the present time it is certain that not a few of the male attendants in the mental hospitals of the Dominion have been chosen for reasons other than their qualifica-

tions for the post. Poilitcal influence has, unhappily, invaded the, asylums and prisons as well as every other public institution in the Dominion. The mental hospitals will benefit much by having their nurses trained in the general hospitals, but the whole system of conducting the former institutions is in need of reformation.