At twenty-four, Clifford Beers, Yale graduate and son of an old New England family, was confined to a mental institution, where he experienced and saw terrible mistreatment of patients. Eight years later, after his time in another institution, he wrote A Mind That Found Itself, exposing the inhumane conditions of these institutions. Beers went on to found an outpatient center for mental health, the Clifford Beers Clinic, in 1913, and is considered the founder of the American Mental Hygiene Movement.