Clifford Beers: The Origins of Modern Mental Health Policy
An Essay by Michael B. Friedman, CSW
First published in The Mental Health News, Fall 2002
"…the afternoon of May 6, 1908 … a little knot of people sat down together in a residence in New Haven, Connecticut, upon the invitation of Clifford Whittingham Beers-a young man with a remarkable history-to organize the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, the first …association of its kind and the beginning of the organized mental health movement in America."
With these words Nina Ridenour begins her excellent history of mental health policy in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. It is a high and well-deserved tribute to Clifford Beers, the founder of what has become the Mental Health Association movement. At the age of 32, five years after he had emerged from three harrowing years of psychiatric hospitalization in three different hospitals, Beers took the first step towards realizing a grand vision he developed while he was hospitalized. It was a vision that arose from his personal experience of abuse at the hands of poorly paid and poorly trained hospital "attendants" and from his witnessing the abuse of so many other patients.
He imagined an advocacy organization that would spread from local to international levels-an organization that would:
·Fight to improve care and treatment of people in mental hospitals
·Work to correct the misimpression that one cannot recover from mental illness
·Help to prevent mental disability and the need for hospitalization
Within a year of founding the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, Beers founded The National Committee for Mental Hygiene and began groundbreaking work that would change the face of mental health in the first half of the 20th century. （continue）