Abstract
AT all points where popular and professional opinion has ground for complaint against the present lunacy administration, the recently issued report of the Royal Commission on Lunacy affords clear and wise guidance to Parliament. The recommendations cover a wide field—public, private, and medical—and are fairly free from pettifogging and meaningless phrases. A certain vagueness appears over at least one of the more radical suggestions, namely, that concerning the end to which reorganisation of the Board of Control should be directed. But generally the advice offered is detailed and practical, or limited to the mere intimation that in particular directions improvement is desirable. The importance of provision for early treatment and for treatment without certification is generously recognised, the Commission advocating a recasting of the lunacy code “so that treatment of mental disorder should approximate as nearly to the treatment of physical ailments as is consistent with the special safeguards which are indispensable when the liberty of the subject is infringed.” To this end detailed proposals are framed. The need for improving the status of asylum medical officers is expressed in terms equally explicit; so is the necessity for protecting medical practitioners, who at present undertake the duty of certification with increasing reluctance. The cost and responsibility of maintenance should, in the opinion of the Commission, be transferred from the Poor Law to the County authorities. No support is given to propagandist allegations of abuses in the administration of the Lunacy Act. On the question of the abolition or reorganisation of licensed houses, the Commission is divided. An Exchequer grant is proposed to meet the additional expenditure involved in a lunacy service such as the report envisages, and the hint is thrown out that an increase in recoveries following early care and the discovery, by research, of new possibilities of cure, will render such expenditure not wholly unremunerative. Further the Commission does not go, and it remains for its successor to presi the problem of national fitness in its broader aspects/ as one of the major political problems of the modern*-State.
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News and Views. Nature 118, 239–242 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118239a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118239a0