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The Scottish Advisory Council, to whom my evidence is about to be submitted, has been appointed to consider ‘the treatment and rehabilitation of offenders’; and I understand that the Council desires me to submit evidence bearing specially on the question of the ‘provision of facilities for psychotherapeutic treatment in Scottish prisons with special reference to sexual and unnatural offences’.
To me as a medical psychologist the terms ‘treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’, which appear in the Council's terms of reference, differ from one another in significance to an extent which seems to demand some special consideration. In the medical sense the term ‘treatment’ signifies such technical assistance of a therapeutic nature as a doctor is able to provide for a patient who consults him, whether in private or in a clinic, in the hope of obtaining relief from a pathological condition which is causing him distress; and psychotherapeutic treatment is a special form of technical assistance appropriate for conditions of a psychopathological origin. Such treatment, if successful, is likely to lead to favourable consequences for society, although this is by no means necessarily the case; but it is essentially something which the individual patient seeks on his own initiative for the relief of his own distress or for his own peace of mind.
‘Rehabilitation’, on the other hand, is a term which is primarily social in its reference; for it signifies essentially the restoration of the individual's social capacities which have been compromised, and which require to be restored in the interests of society.
The difference between ‘treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’ was