Editor:
I suppose I was being naive. I had understood that the meeting last Saturday regarding the Cottage Farm psychiatric facility proposed for Langdale was to be an information meeting - in other words, questions and answers.
What I found was that, despite herculean efforts by the facilitator to keep it just that, it was quite evident that many attendees had different ideas.
The meeting started gently enough with the start up history of the concept, a mother's concern for the effective treatment of her mentally handicapped son and her successful efforts to create a registered non-profit society to pursue that goal. She, and other officers in that society, had seen and heard of farm type facilities where patients like her son could be treated. So far, so good, I thought.
But then the physiologist from the society who followed was grilled to exhaustion, and the made-up minds of many of his questioners became quite obvious. No amount of data, even very solid data, would persuade them that their fear of danger to the community resulting from this psychiatric facility in Langdale, was not realistic. Even before the allotted question time was over, a spokesman for those questioners read out a statement he had prepared before the question-and-answer meeting. He made it pretty obvious that nothing could persuade him and the other opponents to support the Cottage Farm proposal.
For those, like myself, who believe that the proposal represents a welcome forward step in the treatment of mental illness, there is little we can do to alter such mindsets, except to plead for these people to search for data that will persuade them to drop their opposition.
Let the yes or no acceptance of this proposal be a wise and sensible decision, and in good time, we can all be on the same side.
Bernard McGrath
Langdale
