Clifford Beers and the mental hygiene movement

Late in June 1894 an older brother of Clifford Beers was stricken with what was thought to be epilepsy, and Beers became convinced that the same fate awaited him. He graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1897. In 1900 he broke down and tried to kill himself, dropping feet first from an upper window. From August 1900 to September 1903 he was a patient in three Connecticut institutions.

His autobiography told what happened there. By his own count his depression, with its delusions, lasted 798 days. He watched attendants use unnecessary and often brutal force on patients, and on 13 September 1902, after breaking rules on purpose so that he could see conditions for himself, he was moved to the violent ward. He described petty punishments, forced feeding, and restraint in strait-jackets and in hand-restraints called muffs. He wrote it, he said, to protest on behalf of the thousands of patients whose mute submission had never been recorded.

William James read the manuscript, endorsed it and gave Beers an introduction to a publisher. In September 1907 Beers met Adolf Meyer, director of the Psychiatric Institute of the New York State Hospitals, and began working with him. Meyer was looking for words that would cover both better care of the insane and the prevention of mental disorder, and a few days later he proposed mental hygiene. Julia Lathrop of Hull House and the psychiatrist August Hoch, reading the proofs in January 1908, agreed to become trustees of the national society Beers proposed. Longmans, Green published A Mind That Found Itself in March 1908.

In May 1908 Beers organized the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, the first state society. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene was formally founded at a meeting in New York on 19 February 1909, with Beers as its secretary. Its plans took in state care and after-care of the insane, fields in which the State Charities Aid Association of New York had led. Beers founded an international foundation for mental hygiene in 1931. In 1950 the National Committee became the National Association for Mental Health, a forerunner of today's Mental Health America. Beers died on 9 July 1943.