How to Be Happy in America: Clifford Whittingham Beers's A Mind That Found Itself and the Making of Mental Health

Clifford Whittingham Beers's A Mind That Found Itself (1908) was the literary spark that inaugurated the amorphous mental hygiene movement in the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite the book's relative obscurity in discussions of American literature, historians of psychiatry still invoke the idea that it is an "autobiography of genuine literary merit," suggesting that the link between the mental hygiene movement and the literary imaginary was not coincidental—it was constitutive. This paper provides a new aesthetic and political history of the idea of "mental health," pushing back against the prevailing view that Beers's book is a well-meaning instance of turn-of-the-century liberal progressivism that prioritized the patient's voice. It argues that Beers and his mental hygiene movement instead localized the health of the nation in the individual's mental health, giving aesthetic form to later practices of bio-psychiatric nation-making.