ABSTRACT
ANY attempt to present a meaningful statistical picture of the current hospital provisions in Britain for subnormal patients is frustrated by two factors. The first results from the inadequacies of the statistical returns: the Annual Report of the Ministry of Health for the year 1965 1 devotes only two of its seventy-two pages of text to the psychiatric services, and only one paragraph relates to subnormality hospitals. The information for Scotland is even more sparse. Furthermore, subnormality is dealt with under the umbrella heading of psychiatric services, and the distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally subnormal is not always clear. Nor is it possible to estimate from the statistics how many of the population of subnormal patients are also mentally ill, though considerably more information is available in the Registrar General's Statistical Review, Supplements on Mental Health. At the time of writing the latest figures available in the Supplement are those for 1960 and in view of the fact that the Mental Health Act (1959) was brought into effect on 1 November, 1960, this information can throw no light on any changes which may have resulted from the new Act.
