Book excerpt: Excerpt from Summaries of State Laws Relating to the Feebleminded and the Epileptic The National Committee for Mental Hygiene is pledged among other things "to work for the conservation of mental health and to help raise the standard of care for those suffering from nervous disorders, mental disease and mental deficiency." As a contribution towards these purposes, it presents this volume, summarizing the laws relating to the commitment and care of the feebleminded and epileptic in the United States. Mental disorders have always been made the subject of public supervision and the legislation relating to them is a good criterion of the development and progress of the various states in the care given the mentally defective. The states with the most highly developed systems and the best and most complete laws for the care and treatment of defectives are the states that have caused time to be devoted to investigations upon the causes of the defects and the best methods of caring for the sufferers. The states with no, or insufficient legislation relating to the feebleminded and epileptic have failed to take cognizance of the nature of the diseases' and have not taken the proper and most modern steps in institutional care. A number of the institutions for the feebleminded are intended only for those "who may be benefited by instruction," and provision is made for the removal of all patients when they may no longer receive benefit from training. Other institutions deny admission to epileptics. Many states realize that nearly all forms of mental deficiency are incurable, and have provided for perpetual institutional care and segregation. In the framing of the laws relating to the feebleminded and epileptic, there has been a tendency to copy general features from the laws relating to the insane, and from the laws of, other states. In most cases the result has been that a system of wholly inadequate laws has resulted from this hasty and unsystematic law making. With the exception of the laws of a few of the leading states, which have highly developed systems for the care and treatment of the feebleminded and epileptic, the laws present a chaotic mass, which it has been exceedingly difficult to survey and reduce to comparable dimensions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.