Mental health reform needs more than a month

What's holding back the mental health movement that started in the 1800s?

In the late 1800s, a Yale University graduate named Clifford Beers was hoping to escape the mental illness and tragedy that had plagued his relatives. He was unsuccessful. Beers suffered with depression, anxiety, hallucinations, paranoia and suicidal ideation, and in his mid-20s, his family committed him to different mental hospitals. Beers reported that hospital staff abused and degraded him, causing him even more emotional trauma with their brutal and inhumane treatment. Beers emerged from this “mental civil war” with a new weapon in the fight: an autobiography titled A Mind That Found Itself, which became the foundation of America’s mental health reform movement.

Beers went on to develop state, national and international organizations to push legal reforms, fund research, train medical students and raise public awareness around mental health. One of the organizations evolved into Mental Health America, which in 1949, declared May to be “Mental Health Awareness” month. Both the nonpr…