To make provision for the insane is seen to be a social necessity and
the family more than any other social institution profits by the
hospitals and asylums for the treatment and care of such. The relief
of having an insane relative taken away from the home, after months
and perhaps years of anxiety, fear, and suffering on the part of every
other member, cannot be too strongly pictured. The effort now making
to secure early treatment for the first symptoms of mental derangement
and to give even "border-line" cases and exceptionally "cranky" and
nervous people special treatment in mental hygiene marks the
beginning, we must believe, of effective preventive work in this line.
The feeble-minded, however, have a claim of perpetual childhood upon
the parental sympathy, and that, together with common ignorance
concerning their condition or numbers and the social dangers inherent
in their neglect, give us the alarming discrepancy in numbers between
the feeble-minded in suitable segregated care and those left to find
their way or lose it in the usual walks of life. Since Doctor Seguin
wrote his _Treatise on Idiocy_ in 1846 the verdict of science and of
philanthropy has been accumulating as to the need for the full and
complete protection of all who cannot manage successfully, even in the
simplest details, their own lives and the lives of those with whom
they are most closely related. Yet to-day, it is claimed by many
observers, we have only about fifteen per cent, of those requiring
special protection on this account adequately cared for by society.
The family must be relieved of personal care of its insane, its
lower-grade feeble-minded, and its moral idiots. It must be so
relieved for the sake of the normal members of the family. It must be
so relieved still more for the sake of lessening vice, crime,
degenerative tendencies, and actual waste of public money in public
court procedure and in other public institutional provisions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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