[The text of this Report is limited to five pages.]
TRIENNIAL REPORT
ON THE
WORKING OF THE PUNJAB LUNATIC ASYLUM,
for the years 1909,1910 and 1911.
DURING the three years under review the total population has been 837,
817 and 841, practically showing a continuation of the small steady increase
which had been always noted since the original opening of the building in
March 1900, when it was only 465. As has been remarked before, this by
no means betokens any general increase of lunacy in the province, but its
explanation lies—as daily evidenced by the number of persons brought by
their own relations for treatment—rather in the fact of the asylum becoming
widely known and its benefits appreciated. It now rarely happens that a
p atient returns to his home perfectly recovered (especially if his mental
disease had formerly rendered him, as it usually does, a nuisance to his neigh-
bours) without a few days afterwards some other similar person being
brought here for treatment with that explanation. These are not necessarily of
the poorest classes, and even women are now occasionally brought by their hus-
bands and relatives for the same purpose,—a fact which it may reasonably be
claimed speaks very highly for the reputation of the institution, as this is a
mark of confidence rarely given to any Government institution in this country.
As before noted the number of admissions and the average strength always fall
slightly in the latter half of the cold weather.
The percentage of cured still shows a high average and one in
advance of that for previous years. In this particular it must be remember-
ed that it would be very much higher were it not that an enormous percentage
of the inmates are " criminal insanes" (in 1911 a total of 184 out of 841
or 21.88 per cent.). These stay for long periods of probation after having re-
covered, and hence vitiate all statistics of cures or recoveries. So too, for
instance, the number of patients marked as " discharged otherwise " chiefly
includes those men returned to stand their trial or reverting to jail. The total
number of criminal lunatics under detention continues, as before, to slowly
increase. The presence of the criminal lunatic is by no mean a disadvantage,
far from it. Many of them are sane for long periods, some for years, and it is on
these men one relies for a large proportion of the actual working of the asylum,—
they cook, weave, tailor and care for the others, without their aid the native staff
of attendants would have to be multiplied some four to five times, and even then
would perhaps not give the results so satisfactory, for it is a striking evidence of
the " disease " origin of their crimes that many, very many of these men—even
though they have committed some horrible murder during their insanity,—prove
to be, when sane, quiet, respectable, most trustworthy, reliable assistants and
workers, immeasurably superior in tone and conduct to the miserable creatures
who make up the bulk of the men obtainable as attendants ; while nothing is
more pitiful, than when, as sometime happens, one sees a man of this type—for
years perhaps in all but name a trusted attendent—from a recurrence of his
former malady lose all his good characteristics and sink to a level scarcely human.
In return for all the assistance they give everything reasonable is done to make
these men comfortable and contented, and no distinction is over allowed in the
treatment meted out to them and to the non-criminal population,—except that
they are housed in one separate compound.
Accommodation.
The close of the former triennium was coincident with the largest
amount of overcrowding in the male
asylum, but early in 1909 the new
hospital, which affords accommodation for 186 patients, was opened and this
defect at once disappeared. It is difficult to speak too highly of the benefits
derived from these new buildings which are well designed and suitable and
strongly built; they afford infinitely greater facilities for the treatment of
" physical" disease, with which such a large percentage of the patients are