Note and Comment

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 23, 1903

It may not be generally known that the expense of caring for the ever-increasing hosts of the insane in this country is greater than the cost of dealing with crime, yet it appears that such is the fact in the State of Illinois, and therefore presumably so elsewhere, according to the following from the Chicago Tribune:—

The cost to the taxpayers of the disease called insanity is not generally realized. The last general assembly appropriated $5,250,000 to cover the operating expenses of the State charitable institutions during the next two years, and to provide for new buildings and general improvements. Of that amount $3,150,000 was for the benefit of the insane. The appropriations for two years for the two penitentiaries and the Pontiac reform school aggregated $1,416,000. The men who have to pay State taxes find that insanity is more than twice as expensive as crime.

There is no prospect of a change in the situation. No sooner is a new insane asylum opened, than it is filled, and then begins a demand for the establishment of another new one. Many are admitted to the asylums, but few are discharged from them except by death. The alienists say they are much better able to cure insanity if permitted to deal with it in its early stages than they once were, but they complain that the reluctance of the

family to have one of its members sent to an asylum until he is really dangerous prevents their dealing with the disease at a time when it is most amenable to treatment.

At all events, the pressure on the insane asylums knows no abatement. Medical science, which has done so much for the prevention of many kinds of disease, has discovered as yet no prophylactic for insanity, although such a discovery would be a boon indeed. Of all the diseases man is heir to, it is the one which is most dreaded.

The insane must be taken care of, and the State must do it. The duty can not be shirked. It must build one asylum after another as its population increases, and it must provide tenderly for their inmates, but it would be a relief to humanity if medical science could do something to decrease the growing percentage of insanity.