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168
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
Of the occurrences during the year, the most notable was the
issuing of a joint Circular 15/70 heralding the introduction of the
Education (Handicapped Children) Act, 1970. This piece of legislation
provides for the Local Education Authority to assume, from
1st April, 1971, responsibility previously held by the Health
Authority under the National Health Service and Mental Health
Acts for the training of mentally handicapped children. From this
date, Section 57 of the Education Act, 1944, will cease to apply.
In previous Reports I have stated that, rather than administrative
convenience, it should be the quality of service and its
ability to benefit the mentally handicapped child which ought to
determine future patterns in this field. Experience, locally, shows
that the majority of these mentally handicapped children will need
either supervision or social welfare support beyond school age and
this will fall to the local authority to supply. One can only view
the prospects of transfer and re-transfer from one authority to
another with foreboding and misgivings for, at the very least, the
effects will undoubtedly be disturbing to the personal relationships
respectively established. We relinquish our obligations in accordance
with the new Act with the comforting knowledge that the
educational and training facilities available to the mentally handicapped
child in this Borough have been such that improvements,
if obtainable at all, can only be marginal.
Despite the allocation of "Mental Health" largely to the social
side of the local authority's services the problem of the mentally
ill remains primarily a medical one which is inevitably bound up
with hospitals and consultants. On an average, one child in every
100 is born mentally handicapped and one woman in 6 and one
man in 9 will need hospital treatment once in their life because of
mental illness.
Today, fortunately, there is a more humane attitude to the
question of mental disability and incarceration in stark and distant
asylums no longer forms part of treatment. In days gone by most
neighbourhoods had their local "handicapped" who were well
understood, accepted and even cosseted within the community.
Modern psychiatry is endeavouring to revert to something akin to
age-old methods by dealing with mental illness in the patient's
own home and environment.
Although for some years to come the nation will still be
dependent upon the old institutions, the modern approach is for
these large mental hospitals to be replaced and their functions
taken over by the District General Hospital. Transition, however,
will not arrive overnight and the successful operation of day