Clifford Whittingham Beers

Clifford Whittingham Beers (born March 30, 1876, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died July 9, 1943, Providence, Rhode Island) American author and influential figure in the field of mental hygiene in the United States.

Beers was a graduate (1897) of Yale University who suffered severe episodes of depression and anxiety and was maltreated and abused during his confinement at various private and state mental institutions. He shared his struggles with mental illness openly in his autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself (1908), which also served as a call to reform mental health care and to advance the fledgling sciences of psychiatry and psychology.

Beers was a founder of the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene (1908) and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (1909), groups that picked up the term mental hygiene from Swiss-born American psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and that developed an educational and reform movement for the care of the mentally ill. Beers also later organized the International Committee for Mental Hygiene (1919) and the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene (1928). In 1939 Beers’s symptoms of mental illness returned, and he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where he later died.

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 into 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.