MENTAL HOSPITALS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 March 1939, Page 5

MENTAL HOSPITALS

APPEAL BY WELFARE SOCIETY. (To the Editor.) . Sir,—“For more than twenty years,” states the current issue of the Australian Medical Journal, "the mental hospitals of New South Wales have been overcrowded. The excess of patients for whom no accommodation is made by the present programme is 1065.” The Medical Journal goes on to describe the position as “a shocking state of affairs,” and criticises the Government for not tackling the problem in an efficient manner.

Overcrowding in the New South Wales mental hospitals is equivalent to a fraction under .04 per cent, of the total population. During the past ten years New Zealand has spent an average sum per annum of £lOO,OOO on asylum buildings alone, in an effort to overtake our own increasing incidence of mental disability. The position disclosed in the current mental hospitals report by the Government is that overcrowding in New Zealand asylums is also equivalent to a fraction under .04 per cent, of the total population. Will, therefore, the New Zealand Medical Journal perform a like service for the mental patients of this Dominion?

Both in New South Wales and New Zealand, conditions of over-crowding, and understaffing preclude any possibility of introducing (or of extending) modern curative methods, including adequate grading of patients, scientific nutrition, occupation therapy (including of course physical education), and individual psychological and endocrinological attention. New Zealand would need to expend a further five million pounds on asylum buildings alone in order to keep pace with present rates of increase of mental disability and to overtake the overcrowding of her mental hospitals, as well as to increase her asylum staffs in a somewhat similar proportion, if she would deal effectively (on obsolescent lines) with the “shocking state of affairs” on this side of the water. We therefore desire to mark the first five years’ of service in the interests of the scientific prevention of physical and mental ill-health by making an appeal to the people and Government of New Zealand to tackle this urgent job of work with the right end of the shovel. Prevention —possible in at least fifty per cent of all cases —is the only true solution. We are, etc, PHYSICAL & MENTAL WELFARE SOCIETY.