The Worst Infirmity

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 17, 23 April 1903, Page 18

The Worst Infirmity

To judge from the Registrar-General's statistics, it would seem as if New Zealand is, like Kipling's match, prone to go off its head at a faster rate than its neighbors. The proportion of insane people to our population has risen steadily from 19.93 per 10,000 inhabitants in 1874 to 34.47 in 1901. And the statistics shows that ' there is considerably more lunacy among the male element than the female ' — almost exactly one more for every thousand of the population. Our proportion of persons with dethroned reason was, in 1901, greater than that which prevailed in the Australian States at the census 1 of 1891. Victoria then had one lunatic in every 203 persons, New South Wales one in every 359, South Australia one in every 376, Tasmania one in every 383, Western Australia one in every 386, while New Zealand, in 1901, had one in every 289. As a set-off to this, New Zealand has fewer idiots in proportion to population than any State in the Australian Commonwealth .