The Treatment of the Voluntary Boarder
The following paper is the result of experience gained during two and a half years' work at The Retreat, York.It was prepared at the time that public attention was being focused upon the Mental Treatment Act, 1930. One of the most striking features of that Act was the provision that any person—pauper or otherwise—could be received into any mental hospital by applying for admission voluntarily. The removal of the bar of certification was widely welcomed; this welcome was believed by the writer to be partly a sentimental one. So little was known of any of the legal and medical difficulties which the voluntary boarder system had produced during the forty years it had been in fairly constant use in the registered mental hospitals, that these problems were seldom referred to when the Mental Treatment Act was under consideration.