It is with deep concern, yet at last with solid hope, that I present to you the Report of the Commission on Mental, Indigent and Geriatric Patients as directed by the 1970 Session of the General Assembly.

Your Commission speaks for Virginians who are voiceless in their own behalf, utterly dependent on what we, their fellow citizens, can do for them.

Since your Commission made its 1970 Report on the needs of patients in Virginia's mental hospitals, including many indigent geriatric cases, we have studied intensively the needs of Virginia's retarded children and its emotionally disturbed youngsters.

For a long time, all those people had one handicap in common -- a public attitude which they were voiceless to change. Too many of us had the mistaken idea that retardation and mental illness were hopeless.. We found the whole subject distasteful, even frightening. We turned away. That is why public neglect condemns so many of those in our mental hospitals and institutions for the retarded to long, silent misery erupting occasionally into public scandal.

Since 1968 the Commonwealth has made a major effort to repair past neglect. The job cannot be done in a year or two. But now, at last, we can have a realistic hope that Virginia will fulfill its commitment.

I believe we can all feel a deep stirring and upturn in the tide of public opinion. It gives us hope that we shall have more money to work with, year after year. It gives us hope for relieving the crippling shortage of professionals of all kinds through establishment of Psychiatric Institutes which have been authorized since 1944. Above all, it gives hope for a coordinated system of care under which all State and community services can work together without duplication or competition to get the most from every available dollar.

Unless we accomplish the goals set before us in this Report, we shall roll up year after year a crushing burden of costly institutionalized cases far greater than we need to carry.

Unless we accomplish those goals we will be heedlessly cruel to these voiceless fellow citizens whose limitations do not limit their capacity to feel and to suffer.

Let us act now, and go on acting, to keep today's new hope growing and give it substance.

Respectfully submitted,

/s/ Omer L. Hirst
Chairman