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hospital and the mental asylum to encompass the courts, prisons, industry, and indeed "wherever intelligent attempts are being made to direct human activities." 12 It is difficult to tease out the scientific underpinnings for the optimism and crusading zeal which characterized the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s.
The mental hygiene movement claimed an expert knowledge of the emotional economy of individuals, its stages of normal development, its deviations or, as they termed them, ‘maladjustments’, and clinical measures necessary for its rehabilitation (e.g. Craig 1933; Rees 1929). The essential claim of the mental hygiene movement here, was that ...
hygiene movement emerged. The mental hygiene movement was part of a many-faceted effort to come to grips with life in the new urban-industrial society that characterized the progressive era. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH), the organizational spearhead of the mental hygiene movement, was established in 1910. While many
And in 1930 on the occasion of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene Dr. William H. Welch observed, “that big mental hygiene congress … was rather terrible, and an example of arousing the public before the foundation of sound knowledge and doctrine had been laid with good psychiatric and neurological institutes something might be done in mental hygiene, but it would have to be ...
- Sol Cohen
- 1983
- Summary
- Mental Hygiene: ‘Adjustment’, ‘Familial Relations’ and Democracy
- Mental Hygienist Therapeutic Principles and ‘Discursive Transformation’
- Mental Hygiene, Anti-Psychiatry and Mind’s Critique of Psychiatry
- Conclusion
- Funding
In 1970 the British mental health charity, the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) announced a radical change of emphasis. NAMH was the leading charity organisation working in mental health at that time. It had been founded in 1946 as a major embodiment of what was known as the movement for mental hygiene, and an amalgamation of three of ...
As Crossley argues, the mental hygiene discourse grounded its agenda on a claim to established scientific fact. Through this, it foreclosed debate and therefore ruled out ‘democracy in psychiatry’. This contention needs, however, to be explicitly integrated with the fact that the mental hygienist agenda also actively operated against any wider advo...
Speaking at a 1957 NAMH conference on ‘The Maladjusted Child’, the psychiatrist and leading mental hygienist, Kenneth Soddy, told his audience that a doctor friend of his had sent him a cutting from the ‘New Yorker’: But Soddy did not disavow this caricature. In fact he remarked, ‘Now I happen to believe that so firmly that I have pleasure in passi...
For Crossley, the anti-psychiatry movement that emerged in the 1960s set in train a ‘paradigm shift in the wider campaigning culture’. The mental hygiene discourse appeared outmoded. NAMH could not shift its stance to the extent of adopting the radical agenda of anti-psychiatry. Instead it became a ‘representative of the civil rights movement/disco...
It is the issue of authority and its relation to mental health and therapy that substantially informed MIND’s continuities with the mental hygiene movement andits break with it. The mental hygienist psychotherapeutic examination of authority and reinterpretation of it in relation to mental health resulted in a ‘discursive transformation’ that was i...
The author would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for the six month research grant between February and August 2016 on which this article is partially based. (200431/Z/15/Z). Jonathan Toms is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of East Anglia.
- Jonathan Toms
- 2020
Psychiatry and the Mental Hygiene Movement. The Mental Hygiene Movement is linked closely to Clifford Beers (1876-1943), a middle-class businessman and psychiatric patient who authored the classic The Mind that Found Itself, 4 based on his treatment in an asylum for manic depression. His express purpose was to initiate and lead a social ...
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Apr 20, 2024 · Scholars have explored the development of the movement in countries such as Spain, 8 Italy, 9 the Netherlands, 10 Greece 11 and Belgium. 12 Other important research has been devoted to Latino-American countries. 13 While much remains to be done on the history of mental hygiene in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the research produced so far has already provided new and ...
