Franklin Gimson writes his first letter to his wife Dorothy and tells her the most debilitating thing about internment;
(It was) not the boredom, not the uncertainty but the nervous inter-play of personality on personality, the selfishness, the malicious trend given to any scandal, the deliberate misinterpretation of any statement and many signs of extreme nervous tension & lack of mental balance.
Telephone engineer James Anderson is brought in from Stanley to help with the rebuilding of Hong Kong's infrastructure. He's billeted in a mess in Hankow Rd. along with other technicians.
Sources:
Gimson: cited in Nicholas Tarling ed., Studying Singapore';s Past, 2012, 183
Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1996, 245
Note: Of course all of what Franklin Gimson says is true, but the 'big picture' is rather different: in three years and eight months of more than 2,000 people constantly hungry and living in crowded accomodation there were no major crimes, no successful suicide attempts and, although I've never seen statistics to bear this out,my guess is that those given special care as 'lunatics' numbered not many more than would be expected in normal times. For more on this topic see http://gwulo.com/node/26812
My guess is the constant display of unreasonable behaviour described by Gimson helped ward off major pathologies.