me, until I discovered after a day or two that this sight was
rapidly leaving me. Each morning when I awoke the fog-
wall about me had come in a few feet nearer, or it was a little
more dense. Anxiously I would test my sight each day, hop-
ing that I was mistaken; but there was no mistake about it.

Every morning when I arose, I would first go to the head
of the stairs and test my waning vision on a colored curtain
that hung at a window in the hall below. So gradually, so
surely, so relentlessly did my vision finally fade, that I was
obliged to descend one stair each day to see the curtain in
the hall. Finally I counted the stairs and calculated that two
weeks from that day I should be totally blind, and this was
just what came to me.

[Here follows the account of the author's despair, his resolute struggle and success.]

A. V. 15-23

er dætr

4

CLIFFORD WHITTINGHAM BEERS

WHO HAS GIVEN THE WORLD A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE PROBLEMS OF INSANITY

1876

(INTRODUCTORY NOTE)

Mr. Clifford W. Beers, author of "A Mind That Found Itself,'' is the founder and Secretary of The National Committee for Mental Hygiene, New York City, which came into existence as a direct result of the publication of his remarkable autobiography. Mr. Beers has dedicated his life to a great cause and has served it well. In the year 1900, three years after graduating from Yale University, he developed a mental disorder, fortunately of a recoverable kind, which forced him to live for three years as a patient in sundry private and public hospitals for the insane in Connecticut, his native State. While still a patient and largely as a result of unnecessary hardships and injustices suffered by himself and by many fellow-patients, Mr. Beers resolved that, upon recovery and the regaining of freedom, he would publish his experiences and use the book in arousing interest in a national movement in behalf of the insane and also for the prevention of mental disorders. This high purpose was achieved in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties. In 1908, the first of the several editions of "A Mind That Found Itself" was published. In 1909, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene was founded; a model State society for mental hygiene having also been organized by Mr. Beers a few months earlier in Connecticut. During subsequent years, while serving as Secretary of the National Committee, he has helped to organize affiliated State societies in all sections of the country. Though originally planned to help the insane, societies and committees for mental hygiene now work in behalf of all of the mentally abnormal groups: the feebleminded, epileptic, inebriate and the vast number of unstable individuals who, without guidance, are unable so to adjust themselves to their environment as to lead happy or efficient lives. The ultimate goal of the mental hygiene movement is better mental health and increased efficiency for everybody.

The autobiography of Mr. Beers is unique. The frank description by

the author of his mental processes while in a speechless state of depression, which lasted about two years, and in a state of elation, lasting nearly a year, is a valuable contribution to science and to literature. This part of the narrative has been likened to De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater'; the book as a whole having been called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of "the cause" of the insane. In the revised fourth edition, issued in March, 1917, opinions of the book expressed by many representative men are presented in connection with an account of the mental hygiene movement.

The most eminent of American psychologists, the late William James, said of the book, "It is fit to remain in literature as a classic account 'from within' of an insane person's psychology."... "It reads like fiction, but it is not fiction; and this I state emphatically, knowing how prone the uninitated are to doubt the truthfulness of descriptions of abnormal mental processes.'' His Eminence, James Cardinal Gibbons, said, "To me it is a wonderful book. I scarcely remember ever having read anything which stirred me more deeply, or left upon my memory stronger or more vivid impressions.'' Dr. Henry van Dyke writes, "The book is certainly of a most extraordinary quality. A friend of mine sat up nearly all night to read it and said when he brought it back, "That is more interesting than a novel.'"' In the opinion of Dr. Jacob Gould Schurman, "It is a most extraordinary thing to have a book written under such circumstances. If there is anything like it in the history of literature I am not acquainted with it. . . . It is a wonderful volume whether one considers its contents or the circumstances of its origin and I find it intensely interesting."

Not the least interesting fact is that the book has so impressed philanthropists that the author has been able to secure for the National Committee for Mental Hygiene gifts and pledges amounting to nearly a quarter of a million dollars. "A Mind That Found Itself" was published for a great purpose and, as is evident, is achieving that purpose.

A MIND THAT FOUND ITSELF 1

I

THIS story is derived from as human a document as ever existed; and, because of its uncommon nature, perhaps no one thing contributes so much to its value as its authenticity. It is an autobiography, and more: in part it is a biography; for, in telling the story of my life, I must relate the history of another self-a self which was dominant from my twenty'Copyright, 1907, by Clifford Whittingham Beers. Published by Longmans, Green & Co., New York.

fourth to my twenty-sixth year. During that period I was unlike what I had been, or what I have been since. The biographical part of my autobiography might be called the history of a mental civil war, which I fought single-handed on a battle-field that lay within the compass of my skull. An Army of Unreason, composed of the cunning and treacherous thoughts of an unfair foe, attacked my bewildered consciousness with cruel persistency, and would have destroyed me, had not a triumphant Reason finally interposed a superior strategy that saved me from my unnatural self.

I am not telling the story of my life just to write a book. I tell it because it seems my plain duty to do so. A marvelous escape from death and a miraculous return to health after an apparently fatal illness are enough to make a man ask himself: For what purpose was my life spared? That question I have asked myself, and this book is, in part, an

answer.

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 children 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 throughout 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 eliminating 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 the sane would be done by is the essence of Non-Restraint. . . .

...