The Treatment of the Mentally Ill in New Zealand 1840-1880

Abstract

This thesis is intended primarily as a study of a particular aspect of the emergent social organization of the early New Zealand colony. Considerable research has been devoted to the growth of responsible government, and the early history of political institutions, in this country; the remarkable social legislation of the later years of the nineteenth century has also been studied in detail. However, comparatively little has been done to bring to life for the present-day New Zealander the colonial society of the first forty or fifty years of organized settlement. The modification of the social attitudes and the conceptions which the colonists brought with them from Britain, in the face of the startlingly different circumstances of their new home, provides a fascinating field for investigation. Nothing, perhaps, reveals so much about the character of a community as its attitude towards the unusual or abnormal minorities within it. A great deal can be learnt from the manner in which the community is prepared to recognize that it has a duty towards, and provides for, the physically disabled - the blind, the deaf, the aged - and the mentally ill or mentally undeveloped. No attempt is made in this study to deal more than sketchily with the medical treatment of the mentally ill during the period covered ( a course which the author in any case has not the medical and specialized training to contemplate), and emphasis is given principally to the attitudes towards the mentally ill which are expressed in the newspapers, speeches, and official documents of the time. Accordingly, liberal use has been made of quotations from contemporary records to illustrate the views of those concerned with the treatment of the insane. For this reason also, the nomenclature adopted throughout this study has been that in use at the period under discussion - the very fact that (for instance) "lunatics" and "madhouses" were the terms in popular use at one time, "insane" and "asylums" at another, and "mentally ill" and "mental hospitals" at a still later date, may well be a reflection of a more fundamental change in the way in which this subject was regarded, and be significant in itself.