This Shame

"Patients are beaten up and murdered by attendants. . . . [They] are starved. . . . [They live in] antiquated, unsanitary buildings [amid] filth, vermin and overcrowding. . . . Care of the mentally ill is a national disgrace."

This description of U.S. state mental hospitals last week came from no muckraker but from a speaker before the sober, conservative National Committee for Mental Hygiene. Mental health officials, gathered in Manhattan at the committee's annual meeting, agreed with this indictment by Mrs. Edith M. Stern, a writer on psychiatric problems. Cried Maryland's Mental Hygiene Commissioner George H.

Preston: "[The mental hospitals are] facing a crisis."

Items:

P: Some 600,000 patients are crowded into the 180 state mental hospitals, built to house less than 400,000.

P: Allowances for patients' maintenance (less than $400 a year per patient) are barely enough to sustain life.

P: Most hospitals are short of doctors, nurses and attendants (whose pay is often less than $1,000 a year). The hospitals themselves are so medieval, in facilities and treatment, that only 60 of 900 psychiatrists discharged from the armed forces were willing to work in them.

The mental hygiene conferees well knew that the mental hospitals scandal was a hardy perennial; they knew the remedy: not merely better buildings, but funds for more and better-trained personnel, more mental hygiene clinics for preventive treatment.

Who was to blame? The conferees thought they knew the answer. Said Cleveland's Rev. Dores R. Sharpe, Baptist minister, ardent crusader for reform: "John Doe, private citizen, is the real culprit in this shame of democracy."

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