A STRANGE STORY

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 144, 16 December 1930, Page 12

A STRANGE STORY

MR. CLIFFORD BEERS

"A MIND THAT FOUND ITSELF"

In tlio course of his address at the Farmers' Institute last evening Dr. Ralph Noble, who represented Australia at the recent international conference on mental hygiene, referred to the coming visit of the founder of the mental hygiene movement (Mr. Clifford Beers) to New Zealand. "You will find Mr. Beers," said Dr. jSToble, "a remarkably interesting man, a versatile speaker, full of original ideas, and lie has a wonderful gift of persuading people to do things they would never otherwise. think of doing. He will even persuade the Government to do something. (Laughter.) Mr. Beers really needs a holiday. He will enjoy the holiday iv New Zealand, and you will get in return a wonderful impetus and a wonderful inspiration from what he has to say, and the suggestions he will make." It is a remarkable thing that Mr. Beers, the founder of what has become an interantional movement, was himself for three years an inmate of several mental hospitals in the United States. He recovered Ms reason, and told his story in a book which lias become a classic, "A Mind That Pound Itself." This man, the genius of whose mind among a million saw opportunity where no one else had seen it for a century, has devoted the intervening time to furthering the cause of the study of mental diseases, and promoting measures for the amelioration of the conditions of those who are patients in mental institutions. '"The movement as it stands to-day," states a leading specialist, "'owes him a debt that it can never pay. ' Who can predict the extent to which future generations may in. turn be indebted for what he has given to the world, the suffering that will be obviated, the understanding and intelligent treatment that will be encouraged? The way in which the mental hygiene movement originally came into being seems to me of the utmost significance. It was not the outgrowth of any philosophy started by a group who were bund to prove that the tenets of that philosophy were sound. It was infinitely more simple. Its objective —and its sole objective except for some broader formulations regarding prevention and research that appeared even in its first statements —was in its earliest days the improvement of the care of the socalled insane. Mr. Beers was convinced by personal experience that this care was not what it should be, that its defects were due to ignorance largely, to lack of understanding of the mental patient, and of proper standards of care in institutions, and he set out in a constructive way to correct the evils as he saw them. Certain things were wrong-. What could be done to improve them?"