Los Banos Rotary Club History
Tells of State's Mental Health Plan

Declaring that mental disease is primarily an illness just as definite and just as subject to treatment as to physical disease, Dean Lesher, well known Merced newspaper publisher, Tuesday noon of last week told members of the Los Banos Rotary Club some of the things the State Department of Mental Health is doing to combat and relieve the mental health problem in this state. Lesher is chairman of the state's mental health advisory committee, a group of 24 physicians, psychiatrists, business and professional people who are seeking to improve the mental health problem in the state.

Declaring that today's greatest need is public and professional education, trained personnel and additional facilities, Lesher said the committee has recommended to the state legislature an appropriation of $70 million for actual operating expenses the coming year, plus $15 million for expansion of present facilities. This includes $5 ½ million for the new California Medical Center at U.C.L.A. for training of personnel and extensive mental research.
Many other changes and improvements are being recommended for the program, including a new procedure of admittance and care of patients in mental institutions which will permit admission without the present stigma of legal court procedure and court records.

As to the program itself, Lesher reported that in California today 54 per cent of the hospital beds are occupied by mental patients. Almost 20,000 persons have been committed by court order to the California State Hospital alone this year, with 7,000 now in custody. Because of the help that is available for mental patients today, more than 70 per cent of the persons admitted are eventually released or discharged to lead normal lives again, most of them within 30 to 60 days. Or those released only about 20 per cent ever require further hospital treatment.

Lesher said that nationwide one out of every twelve people will be treated at some time or other in their lives for mental sickness and he predicts this percentage will increase as we continue to lessen our work-week hours and increase our leisure time.

Crediting the Director of Mental Health, Frank Tallman, with having revolutionized procedure for mental treatment and for changing the conceptions of mental health thinking, Lesher briefly reviewed the changed program as it is being set up today, designed to restore the patient to comparative usefulness to society where he will be able to lead a normal life rather than be forever confined behind the walls of an institution.
Lesher emphasized the tremendous cost of the present program and declared that in most departments the program could be carried out with greater effectiveness and far less expense on a county rather than a state basis. This is particularly true, he said, of elderly people now committed to state institutions as seniles. Fifty per cent of such person, he said, die of a broke heart within a year, and another 25 per cent within the second year.
Lesher emphasized the progress that has been made in treatment of mental casts in recent years and of the increasingly general acceptance by the public of the fact that mental strain and fatigue can cause sickness that is completely curable if treated in earlier stages, with no apparent after effects. The important thing, he concluded, is that the public recognize such instances and consider same in the light of an ordinary physical illness, and as readily accept such victims back into the routine channels of society as they would the recovered victim of any other disease.

January 6, 1955

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