Mental Health Awareness Month — A History
Clifford Whittingham Beers was 24 years old when he attempted suicide. For the next three years, he was hospitalized in three different places, and after his release, wrote a book about his experiences.¹ This autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself, was published five years later, and would provide a desperately needed spark for social reform of mental health services, which at the time included brutal, punitive treatment by physicians and attendants (for example, Beers writes about being spat upon, beaten, force fed, and cursed regularly).²
To give you a better idea of what things were like for him — this man who had attempted suicide and needed compassionate, professional support — here is an excerpt from A Mind That Found Itself:
Acting on order of the doctor in charge, one of them (the attendants, or “keepers”) stripped me of my outer garments; and clad in nothing but underclothes, I was thrust into a cell. Few, if any, prisons in this country contain worse holes that this cell proved to be. It was one of five, situated in a short corridor adjoining the main ward. It was about six feet wide by ten feet long and of a good height. A heavily screened and barred window admitted light and a negligible quality of air, for the ventilation scarcely deserved the name. A patient confined here must lie on the floor with no substitute for a bed but one or…
