From the traditional account to an ‘off-centred history’ of the mental hygiene movement: the question of the international (1908–1939)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The best known historical narrative of the international mental hygiene movement among English-speaking audiences locates its origins in the publication of A Mind That Found Itself , the autobiographical account of Clifford Beers (1876–1943), a Yale graduate and former psychiatric patient. The success of the book is thought to have prompted the creation of the first Society for Mental Hygiene in Connecticut in 1908. Beers’ biography, published as Advocate for the Insane in 1980, contends that mental hygiene abroad developed from seeds first sown in the USA and subsequently in Canada. This article offers a critical reappraisal of that narrative and advances an alternative framework for understanding the history of the international mental hygiene movement during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on a body of scholarship, emerging since the 1980s, that has sought to decentre the prevailing account, exposing the multiplicity of forces at work in a history that diverges from any straightforward, linear trajectory radiating from a single point of origin. By tracing this decentred history, the article highlights the contested nature of the ‘international’ in the context of the mental hygiene movement. Case studies from the USA, France, Brazil, and Argentina reveal both the conflicts it engendered and the diverse meanings and significance it assumed within distinct national settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".