Medicine: Mind Triumphant

Clifford Whittingham Beers, bellwether and battering ram of the Mental Hygiene Movement, last week began a round of salutes. The occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Movement’s founding. Yale sounded off first with an all-day anniversary meeting of the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, first of a world-wide system of similar organizations fostering mental health. In Boston the Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene followed with a twentieth anniversary meeting. Again Leader Beers was guest of honor. Next day he was in Manhattan where Dr. Haven Emerson was to present him with the gold medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences.* Awaiting bestowal was a Cross of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Clifford Beers’s mind, once a wreck, now brilliantly useful, stood triumphant. The U. S. has several characters who have pulled themselves out of profound difficulties by their own bootstraps and then proceeded to lift others similarly afflicted. What Franklin D. Roosevelt did after infantile paralysis. Robert Benjamin Irwin and Helen Keller after blindness, and Dr. Earl Carlson after crippling birth-injuries (TIME, May 30). Clifford Beers has done on an even larger scale after insanity. Thirty-three years ago his mind lost its balance: he imagined himself doomed to epilepsy because a brother suffered from that disease. Fear became a delusion. His mind broke down completely, and relatives put him into private institutions where treatment was crude and cruel (strait jackets, beatings, throttlings. cursings). Despite maltreatment his mind rediscovered itself. He resolved to start a movement to improve conditions among the insane. Transferred, before recovery, to the Connecticut state asylum, he deliberately got himself into the “violent ward” to observe methods. As part of the cowing practice then in vogue, attendants kicked, beat and insulted the patients, sometimes breaking bones, occasionally killing. After Clifford Beers was freed he published (in 1908) his famed autobiography A Mind That Found Itself, which this year went into its nineteenth edition.* Clifford Beers always had what one-time Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes calls an “instinct for the jugular.” He took his manuscript first to the greatest U. S. psychologist of the time. Harvard’s late William James; then to the greatest U. S. psychiatrist, Johns Hopkins’ Adolf Meyer. Both approved. Clifford Beers, zealous and determined, went about the country proselytizing for decent, understanding care of the mentally deranged. Professor Meyer suggested the phrase “Mental Hygiene” for the movement. Insane asylums 25 years ago were mostly custodial institutions. Mr. Beers’s National Committee for Mental Hygiene has converted most of them into hospitals for scientific treatment. Nowadays about one-third of the patients declared mentally incompetent recover completely under intelligent care. Another one-fifth are freed as improved. No longer is mental disease considered incurable or a disgrace. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene, directed by Dr. Clarence M. Hincks, Toronto psychiatrist, is now emphasizing preventive work, one of its original purposes. The U. S. already has more than 700 mental and child guidance clinics. An international committee coordinates the work of national Mental Hygiene societies in 34 foreign lands, held an international congress in Washington in 1930, will hold another in Paris two years hence. Clifford Beers’s sturdy diligence motivates them all. He is a tall, swarthy. hazel-eyed, healthy, witty man of 57 who works & works, talks & talks insistently for Mental Hygiene. For 21 years there has been a Mrs. Beers whom he publicly extols as “friend of my youth who did believe in me and who encouraged me in my ambitions.”

*At the same ceremony Daniel Willard was to give Newton Diehl Baker and Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise was to give Commander Evangeline Booth similar gold medals.* Doubleday, Doran ($2).