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Show Bar Foundation Spokesman Protests Article in Magazine sands" of other anonymous "sane men and women" do not get "put away." We submit that the public has been misled by this article, and that The Reader's Digest should seek to rectify the situation by publishing an article which discusses the basic problems prob-lems of financing adequate mental men-tal health programs. There is no professional group on which blame can be laid; doctors and judges, social workers and hospital hos-pital superintendents all are trying try-ing to do the best job they can within the means they have. There is little that is sensational about such a discussion; more public money for the care of sick persons is exciting only to those of us who work in this field. But such an article needs desperately to be written. Yours very truly, JOHN C. LEARY Deputy Administrator-Librarian. We suggest that abundant material ma-terial exists for an article setting out these more basic mental health problems, and that there is a definite need for a magazine such as The Reader's Digest to build public support behind improved im-proved mental treatment facilities. facili-ties. This comes down largely to a matter of providing more public pub-lic dollars to care for mentally ill persons unable to afford private priv-ate treatment, whether the money mo-ney comes from city, county, state, or federal funds, and, unfortunately, un-fortunately, this may not be the sort of s appeal that is suitable for a popular publication such as yours. We realize that it makes extremely exciting reading read-ing when your subscribers can visualize thousands of helpless persons being "imprisoned" in mental hospitals, but we strongly suggest that a publication of the stature of The Reader's Digest has an obligation to bring the plight of the mentally ill in America to the attention of the public so that these unfortunate John C. Leary, deputy administrator admin-istrator and librarian of the American Bar Foundation has written the Publishers of the Reader's Digest to protest certain cer-tain parts of a recent Digest article entitled "The Tragedy of Sane People Who Get Put Away." Following is Mr. Leary's letter: let-ter: , Mrs. Lila Acheson Wallace and Mr. DeWitt Wallace Publishers The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. Pleasantville, New York Dear Mr. and Mrs. Wallace: On behalf of the American Bar Foundation, the national legal research organization, I am writing writ-ing to apprise you of certain objections we have to the publication publi-cation of the article bv Albert mental hospital or in a county rest home is not nearly so important im-portant as the question of whether the more than half million mil-lion persons in American mental hospitals are receiving the treatment treat-ment they require. It should be pointed out that "reform" laws to not "dump" elderly persons into mental hospitals their families do; and families will continue to do so, under even the most formalistic hospitalization procedures, until local communities communi-ties provide facilities to care for their own elderly, but indigent citizens. With hundreds of thousands thou-sands of persons in serious need of psychiatric help we feel it is irresponsible reporting and publishing pub-lishing to take several examples, blow them up into "thousands of normal men and women . . . being railroaded into mental hos- Q. Maisel entitled "The Tragedy of Sane People Who Get Put Away," contained in the February Febru-ary 1962 issue of The, Reader's Digest. We object initially to the double implication of the footnote foot-note on page 98. Mr. Maisel implies, im-plies, by tying in our publication, The Mentally Disabled and the Law, with his reference to fictitious fic-titious names, that his stories about "Jane Doe," "Rhoda Roe," and "Peter X" are contained in our book. Also, Mr. Maisel gives the unmistakable impression that he consulted extensively with the American Bar Foundation, that the article had our general pitals every year," and then suggest sug-gest that the simple cure for all of this lies in formalized hospitalization hospi-talization procedures, since "only when all men are secure from unjust imprisonment can each of us feel truly free." By concentrating on the emotional and outdated criminal aspects of hospitalization procedures, pro-cedures, Mr. Maisel has unfortunately unfor-tunately moved the spotlight away from the tremendous number num-ber of persons who are in need of mental treatment, and he has overlooked completely the basic problems of financing and staffing staff-ing public mental hospitals and community mental health clinics. individuals can be given the treatment necessary to return them to their families and a productive pro-ductive place in the community. Mr. Maisel's basic, though unstated, un-stated, premise is that state mental men-tal hospitals are terribly bad places, and that to be hospitalized hospital-ized in one is comparable to being be-ing imprisoned in a penal institution. in-stitution. It is beside the point that we do not, agree with this premise. The important thing is that Mr. Maisel does not seem to care what happens to the more than one-half million persons in this country who populate state i mental hospitals, so long as "Jane I Doe," "Rhoda Roe," and "thou- endorsement, and that persons who read our book will be led to the same conclusions that he reaches in his article. As a matter of fact our publication does not contain these fictitious names' cases, Mr. Maisel did not confer with us regarding the substance . of his article, and the article does not at all reflect the academic, factual tenor of our research regarding re-garding the laws governing admissions ad-missions to mental hospitals. We are especially concerned about these false implications because they tend to cast doubt on the standing of the American Bar Foundation as an objective research re-search organization, and because they have, in fact, caused friends and supporters of the Foundation to question our research methods and motivations, particularly in this area of laws dealing with mentally disabled persons. Of course, we do not question Mr. Maisel's privilege to write an article expressing his own views on a particular subject, nor do we question your freedom to publish such an article. What we do object to, however, is the definite implication, despite the disclaimer to the contrary, that the views expressed by Mr. Maisel are in essence the views of the legal profession and, in particular, those of the American Ameri-can Bar Foundation. Although we can only speak for our own institution we want to make it unmistakably clear to you that the views expressed by Mr. Maisel do not reflect at all what we have found to be the really basic problem in hospitalization procedures for mentally ill persons. per-sons. We believe that his assertion asser-tion that "thousands of sane men and women are being wrongfully 'put away' is erroneously misleading, mis-leading, and only tends to obscure ob-scure the more fundamental problem of what is being done to help those persons in this country who are in need of mental treatment. For example, we feel that the matter of whether 1,500 indigent elderly persons are housed in a state |