THE HIDDEN FEAR
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR, I am a mental nurse, and have read the letters from Mr. Carmichael Marr and Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones. 'I think that Mr. Marr's is mostly right, and Sir Robert's mostly wrong.
I nursed in a private mental Home where the fees were 20 guineas a week. We nurses had our meals in the Servant's Hall with the maids. In that villa there were five patients, five nurses, and five maids. We got a good breakfast and dinner, but a poor supper. We had a small ration of butter, enough for two mouthfuls, and half a pound of brown sugar. As this was some years after the War this seemed stingy. We were on duty from 8 a.m. till 8 p.m., with no time off to our- selves except for meals.
We had tea with three patients. Scraps of broken cake came up, but the Matron had meals with the other two, and, by the smell from the kitchen their meals must have been good. We had one day off a week, but no chance of going to Church en Sundays. In many private Homes mental nurses are treated as machines without souls.
Twice a day we took our patients to the " Park " for exercise. It was a large field with four or five great trees.. We walked round and round a path for an hour always in the same direction. We all suffered from boredom, and after twelve hours with one's patients they are apt to get on one's nerves.
Nurses in the County Asylums have Nurses' Homes, and a bedroom apiece. In some private Homes the nurse has to sleep in a bedroom with three insane patients, and has no bedroom of her own at all. But no one seems to enquire.
The doctor came over only once in ten days, and for the first and only time that I have ever heard a' doctor insolent to a patient it was to mine, sneering at her for liking to pray.
I should like to do away with all private mental Homes.
I was paid a week, the other nurse £40 a year. No doubt the maids were better paid. Eight hours on duty is quite enough, but I have a friend in a County Mental Hospital who is on duty from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m. with only time off for meals, and two days a week. This seems like starving for live days, and over-feeding for two.
The drawing-room was always shut up, and we sat in a small sitting-room out of which was a greenhouse, but every- thing in it was dead. No one seemed to care even to have flowers growing.
Hardly any nurses in these private Mental Homes have passed their Medical psychological exams. If a nurse leaves school at fourteen she finds it very difficult to do any exams., and she does not always understand the doctor when he is lecturing.
I nursed in a paying hospital in a ward of 25 patients. Ten
of them were voluntary boarders, but we nurses were not told that fact, and we treated them all as insane. There were two padded cells at the end of the ward, and I did not think it very nice for the less acute cases to know they were there.—
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