Beers, Clifford

   (1876–1943)

   The founder of the "mental hygiene" movement, Beers grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, his family in the produce business. While Beers was a student at Yale University, in 1894 a beloved brother became stricken with epilepsy. Beers found that his mind dwelled upon the fear of developing the illness himself. As he said in his autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself (1908), "This was the thought that soon got possession of my mind. The more I considered it and him, the more nervous I became; and the more nervous, the more convinced that my own breakdown was only a matter of time" (pp. 7–8). Indeed, by the time Beers graduated in 1897 he was, as he said, "a sick man." He went in and out of several private institutions before his final recovery; in 1908, the same year in which he published his book, he founded the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, and the following year (1909) he organized the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, later called the National Association for Mental Health, of which he was general secretary until 1939. The mission of the National Association for Mental Health was to prevent mental illness, to remove the stigma from the condition, and to promote the training of professionals and research in the field. As writer Albert Deutsch (1905–1961) later said in his influential work, The Mentally Ill: A History of Their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times (1937)—a book sponsored by the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene—"A Mind That Found Itself created a profound impression in professional and lay circles. Its rallying cry was heard and heeded. Men and women from all walks of life flocked to the banner flung aloft by the young reformer" (p. 309). Indeed, by 1966 the book had had 38 printings. The term "mental hygiene," already in widespread use in Europe, was suggested by Adolf Meyer, a charter member of Beers’ National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In 1931, Beers became cofounder of an International Committee for Mental Hygiene, of which he served as general secretary until 1939. A key concept for the mental hygiene movement was "mental health," by which they understood any quantitative variation from the norm. Psychiatric illness, by contrast—a clinician’s concept—involved qualitative distinctions among kinds of diseases. With the emphasis of the mental hygiene movement on outpatient facilities, one might see in the work of Beers the beginnings of social psychiatry.