VISITING MENTAL HOSPITALS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Yielding to the oft-repeated request of one of my friends that I should " write to the Spectator," I venture now to ask the kind hospitality of your columns in order to ventilate a matter which is constantly in my heart and mind : I refer to the matter of mental hospital visiting. Having the honour of belonging to two societies which have for their object the assistance of mental and nervous patients, I have constantly hoped for some years past that the visitation of such patients, housed in our large State hospitals, would become an established thing.
The doctors themselves desire this, knowing how such social service and sympathetic ministry would help many a case under their care. The chaplains, of course, warmly desire it ; and the patients themselves. How earnestly and pathetically, time after time, do the patients say, " I am not visited. Can you not send me some kind visitor from the outside world to cheer me ? " Sir, not only have I heard that pitiful request from others : I myself have made it over a dozen times until I gave up in despair. For eleven months I was a patient (virtually a voluntary one) in a mental hospital a long distance from London where several of any friends live ; and farther still from the abode of my nearest relatives, an aged, poor and very delicate clergyman and his wife and daughter.
My bitter experience during that time leads me to plead most earnestly with your generous and fair-minded readers that those with any leisure—even so little as two hours each month—would at once communicate with the chaplain or the medical superintendent of the mental hospital for their district, and express their willingness to visit unvisited patients who desire this.
Other forms of help besides visitation are welcome. For instance, now being in touch with four such hospitals, I could well make use of a dozen or more copies of the Spectator— a paper not supplied among the periodicals purchased by the Instittitions, I am told. My own copy of the Spectator goes an extensive round 1
Another welcome form of help is to link a patient to an " outside " friend by means of a pleasant and helpful corre- spondence, from which would naturally develop the sending of small suitable gifts to the patient such as dessert fruit in particular, and salad ; writing materials, literature, materials for fancy work or handicraft allowed to be done in leisure hours.
In my Bible I have placed a newspaper cutting dealing with " Asylum Patients." A distinguished speaker concludes his speech with this pregnant sentence : " The public are very cruel in such mailers." And so they are.
But do they mean to be so ? I appeal to the Christians in England to change this dictum, and to prove that they, at least, are very sympathetic and kind in such matters.—
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