Report / Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness and Mental Deficiency 1954-1957.
- Great Britain. Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness and Mental Deficiency 1954-1957.
- Date:
- 1957
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report / Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness and Mental Deficiency 1954-1957. Source: Wellcome Collection.
35/346 (page 23)
![when patients are admitted to mental or mental deficiency hospitals are so complicated that even people who have had personal experience of them have only a vague idea of the procedures which they themselves have used and certainly do not know about the whole elaborate system. Those who have never had personal contact with the mental health services are almost completely ignorant of how they work in practice. 69. Because of this, when people hear of these procedures having been used in a particular case they often think that the law is being misapplied. For instance, people with a friend or relative who has been a patient in a mental hospital and who has come out well or much better than when he went in do not think of him as “a person of unsound mind”, or as the sort of person who ought to have been “certified”. Others are very indignant when they hear of people who have become mentally dis- ordered in their old age being “certified”. Even people who accept the idea that mental illness is susceptible to medica] treatment like other illnesses frequently think that, in contrast to this, “certification” carries the implication of permanent mental derangement or life-long or hereditary mental instability. As a result, they tend to draw a distinction between people who are temporarily ill or whose mental illness is known to be due to physical causes or who have no mental illness until late in life and other people, usually unknown to them, whom they describe as “really mental” and for whom they consider “certification” to be appropriate. Few people realise that “certification’’ is simply a procedure for admission to hospital which has to be applied under the present law to many patients who are expected to recover quite quickly after proper treatment, and that for many old people it is the only method of admission to the hospitals which provide the expert medical and nursing care which they require. 70. Most people know even less about mental deficiency. In the first place, few people know what the distinction between mental deficiency and mental illness is. They may know families with a child who is obviously abnormal, and they may include such children in their idea of the “really mental” people. On the other hand, increasing popular interest in the nature of mental disorders and a growing public sympathy with handicapped children, particularly the physically handicapped, are bringing some people, rather slowly perhaps, to a more understanding attitude towards children who are born mentally handicapped or deformed. In either case, when people think of mental defectives they tend to think of children or adults with severe mental defect, who are usually also abnormal in appear- ance. ‘They dislike the (mistaken) idea that old people, or people who recover from short-lived mental illnesses, are through certification identified with defectives of this sort. They also see no connection between these more severely handicapped defectives and some young people they may read about in the newspapers who look perfectly normal and can do a normal job but are nevertheless also “certified ’’ as “mental defectives ”’. Popular scientific books and press articles or wireless programmes do not tell them much about these high-grade defectives or the reasons why the present ‘Mental Deficiency Acts apply to them. 71. A good deal of publicity is given to discussion of the mental condition of people who have committed serious crimes, (particularly crimes of violence. When such a crime is committed by a patient from a mental or mental deficiency hospital, or by a person who has some time previously been a patient, the fact may be reported in the press. Quite apart from this, the mental state of other offenders is often a subject of evidence at their trial, and there is considerable public interest in scientific discussion of the interrelation between abnormal mental conditions and crimes of 23](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32177768_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
