Over 100 years ago, people with mental illnesses were viewed as destructive to society. In mental institutions, people with mental health conditions were severely abused, both physically and emotionally, furthering their detrimental conditions. Today, this prejudice practice has dramatically improved and the process of mental health related research has changed, thanks to Clifford Beers.
Clifford Whittingham Beers was born in 1876. He suffered from depression and paranoia, and was first confined to a private institution in 1900. During his time in the institution, he experienced and witnessed maltreatment at the hands of staff. This drove him to stand up for people suffering from mental health conditions and in 1908, Beers wrote a book called “A Mind That Found Itself” which was an autobiographical account of his hospitalization and the abuse he had to endure.
As an articulate insider of the Yale intelligentsia and of well-known private and public asylums, Beers crafted a vision of recovery from mental illness that engaged others and caught the attention of mental health professionals. His autobiography provided a balanced, substantive view of mental illness and drew attention to the often horrific conditions of mental institutions. Beers played a major role in formulating mental health policy by establishing a database of mental institutions and keeping statistics on the number of individuals served by those institutions and of the psychiatrists who served at them.
Beers founded the “Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene” in 1908, now named “Mental Health America”, in order to continue the reform for the treatment of the mentally ill.
