MENTAL HEALTHMANSHIP
is true that at Gloucester, Nottingham, York, Oldham and maybe one or two other places, social psychiatric services have developed as 'isolated ex- periments' in just that manner to•which I paid tribute in my 'Certified' article. But why is it that there is denied to forty-nine people what is accessible to the fiftieth? For what other reason than the complacency and obscurantism that surround the problem of mental illness today in its general context and that 's so amply exhibited in the two letters contributed to your columns by Mr. Kenneth Robinson?
'Hanno' declares himself for Mr. Robinson. I am unable, however, to avoid the, feeling that, had he been a certified patient within the' sphere of ad- ministration of a medical superintendent whose 'powers resemble those of a medimval monarch or a modern totalitarian dictator,' who 'is sometimes wrong, and may on occasions be seriously in error,' who is recruited from 'doctors with inadequate per- sonalities, or who lack the average quantum of drive and energy' (my quotations come, of course, from his letter), he might well have been on my side in- stead. I have, even as things are, not entirely lost my hopes of him.—Yours faithfully, Muse of Commons, SW 1
DONALD MCI. JOHNSON
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