Thirty-seventh annual report for the year 1944 / [Cardiff City Mental Hospital].

  • Cardiff City Mental Hospital
Date:
[1945?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Thirty-seventh annual report for the year 1944 / [Cardiff City Mental Hospital]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are thatjthe mental hospital cannot, like the general hospital, get rid of its failures, and a large proportion of its failures are undoubtedly due to the fact that a wholly unwarranted fear of the mental hospital keeps the majority of patients from coming in for treatment until their disease is advanced and incurable. Just as a cancer that is not eradicated early quickly spreads and disseminates throughout the body so that treatment after a few months cannot be other than palliative, so with mental disorder. While the public continue to treat it as something shameful and to be hidden, and until they realise that it can be cured or considerably alleviated by early treatment, many thousands of people who could be cured will be fated to go through life with “ incurable ” mental disease. (3) Mental Defect. This is a very large problem about which too little is know to the public ; in fact mental defect and mental disorder are commonly assumed to mean the same thing. Simply stated, mental defect is a condition of arrested or incomplete development of the mind, occurring before the child is born, during birth from injury to the brain, or shortly following birth in association with brain diseases like meningitis or epikpsy. Whereas the insane patient is born rich with full brain capacity and becomes poor owing to disease in later life, the mental defective has been born poor and his brain never develops normally. The Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (1929) estimated the total number of mental defectives in England and Wales certifiable under the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 at more than 300,000. In addition it is calculated that 10% of the total population of school age are educationally defective, i.e., 600,000 children are backward to an extent that would require special arrangements for their education. The number of defec¬ tives in institutions was 89,904, i.e., 2-2 per thousand of the population. The social implications are, of course, wider than these figures would indicate for they do not include the inefficient, the shiftless, the un¬ employable, the delinquents, criminals and prostitutes who do not come ujider supervision or certificate, and amongst whom mental defect and disorder are very common. Mental defect, like insanity, varies widely in degree, and while there is no difficulty in recognising severe grades of defect, the slighter forms or higher grades of defect shade into normality and can only be recognised by the expert . It is not always an unmitigated evil. It should be remembered that the higher grades of mental defectives do the lowliest and poorest-paid grades of work in the community and are very necessary as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. As we become more civilised and life becomes more technically complicated we find that we can do without them less. (4) Child Psychiatry : Behaviour and Emotional Disorders in Children. This most important branch of psychiatry still gets only the scantiest of attention in this country. Over fifteen years ago the Child Guidance Council was established with the object of promoting the treatment of difficult and maladjusted children in Great Britain. It is now realised more and more that delinquency, social maladjustments, psychoneuroses and even psychoses have their roots in childhood and unless more is known about their origins, attempts to cure them in adult life are seriously handicapped. Furthermore if there is to be any effective prevention it must be applied as early in life as possible. Nothing would pay pschiatric dividends more in later life than a well run Child Guidance Clinic in an Area for the treatment of psychiatric problems in children up to the age of 14 or 16 years. To have the confidence of the public and of the medical profession, such clinics should be property staffed by expertly trained psychiatrists, by educational psychologists and by trained psychiatric Social Workers. It is not enough to provide
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