克利福德·比尔斯：现代心理健康政策的起源

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克利福德·比尔斯：现代心理健康政策的起源

   “1908年5月6日的下午，… 康涅狄格州纽黑文的一座住宅里，一小群人坐在一起，他们受克利福德·威廷汉姆·比尔斯的邀请—一位有不同寻常历史的年轻人，组织起了康涅狄格州心理卫生协会，第一个…它的爱心协会和美国有组织的心理健康运动的开始。”

    Nina Ridenour用这些文字在20世纪上半叶开始了她的美国心理健康政策的辉煌历史。这对于克利福德·比尔斯，这位心理健康协会运动的创始者来说是崇高的且也是他应得到的最好的尊敬。在他32岁那年，也就是他挣脱出3年非常痛苦的在3家不同医院的精神科住院治疗岁月5年后，比尔斯朝着意识到他在住院时所发展的一个极其重要的远见迈开了第一步。这个远见起因于他在医院受到那些报酬低、缺乏训练的医院“服务员”的虐待的个人经历和他亲眼目睹许许多多其他病人受虐待的情况。

    他设想倡导一个能从地方传播到国际上去的组织，这个组织能够：
    ·为改进对住在心理医院的人们的关爱和治疗而奋斗
    · 努力改正那些认为得了心理疾病再也不会康复的错误观念
    ·帮助防止产生心理残疾和住院治疗的需求

    在1年的时间里创建起康涅狄格州心理卫生协会后，比尔斯创建了国家心理卫生委员会并开始了在20世纪上半叶旨在改变心理健康面貌的开天辟地的工作。(待续)

      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）

http://mhawestchester.org/advocates/beers802.asp