The Propagation of Insanity and Allied Neuroses

Abstract

For the past thirty years our insane population, as recorded in the annual Reports of the Commissioners in Lunacy, has steadily increased at the rate of over 1,500 a year, until in December, 1888, it had reached the alarming total of 84,340. Nor can even this large total be taken as at all fully representing the number of our insane. According to the census returns in 1871, the Commissioners' figures represented only 82·1 per cent., and in ‘81 only 86·5 per cent. of those returned as idiotic and insane; and when we remember that the census returns were made by fathers and heads of families more likely to under than overstate the numbers of afflicted in their households, we may venture to estimate that at present our insane population is fast approaching the enormous total of 100,000.