A mind that found itself : an autobiography / by Clifford Whittingham Beers.

  • Clifford Whittingham Beers
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A mind that found itself : an autobiography / by Clifford Whittingham Beers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    been done tardily and unintelligently. The outlook, how¬ ever, is encouraging. Many States are now making effective efforts to improve their system of care and a few have even begun to do preventive work. Best of all, the general public is beginning to learn that many forms of mental disorder are both recoverable and preventable. Even with the prevailing standards of care and treatment, about twenty per cent of those placed in institutions recover and an added twenty per cent recover sufficiently to warrant their being discharged as “improved.” When all patients committed receive prompt and scientific treat¬ ment, these percentages will, no doubt, be increased. In presenting this book I have several definite purposes. First: I hope to rob insanity of many of its terrors at least those which do not rightly belong to it. Most chil¬ dren are afraid of the dark until they learn that its hidden monsters are imaginary. But this childish fear is a sublime mental process compared with the unreasoning dread of insanity that prevails in the minds of most adults through¬ out the civilized world. Under certain conditions an insane person is, without doubt, the unhappiest of men, but I shall prove that sometimes he is not less happy is indeed happier —than a sane person under the most favorable conditions. To a startling degree the unhappiness of the insane is directly due to the perhaps unconscious lack of consideration with which they are treated. This is fortunate; for these external contributory causes can be eliminated; — and no one thing will go so far toward elim¬ inating them as the universal adoption and continued use of the humane and equally scientific principle of Non- Restraint in the treatment of mental disorders. As the reader will come to know: —doing to the insane as tire sane would be done by is the essence of Non-Restraint.
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