ABSTRACT
The organisation of mental health promotion (MHP) is one hundred years old, dating back to the foundation of the Finnish Association for Mental Health in 1897. Elements of its history may be traced back to the mental hygiene movement founded in the early years of the twentieth century by the American Clifford Beers. Beers began by exposing abuse in asylums and the mental illness system (Beers, 1908) and advocated a constructive concept of mental health mainly through an emphasis on the development of self-help groups. His ideas spread in the United States through the establishment of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and were taken up in other countries. In 1922 a National Council for Mental Hygiene was set up in Britain, whose first aim included 'educating the public in all matters which militate for and against good mental health'. By 1930, the first international congress in Washington, attended by over three thousand participants, brought together delegates from twenty-two countries each of which had developed their own national committees. Although in the 1920s the mental hygiene movement was a citizen-based movement supporting the work of professional associations, in the 1930s it focused more on mental illness, institutional care and the emerging professions of psychiatry and psychiatric social work. By 1937, the date of the first European International Congress on Mental Hygiene in Paris, the 'movement' had become more professionalised. Thomson (1995) traces the history of the international mental hygiene movement and the divisions caused initially by the exaggerated influence of Beers himself and the American National Committee on the international movement and, later, by three different strategies which emerged: the propagandist, the research and educational, and the restrictionist.
