The mental hygiene movement is most commonly associated with an explosion of popular interest in psychology in the United States at the start of the twentieth century. The formation of a national association of mental hygiene in 1909 by former mental patient Clifford Beers was one manifestation of this broader enthusiasm. Another was the recasting of Freud in a more optimistic, self-improving American idiom, which was at least as important as a national organization when it came to the spread of mental hygiene thought and practice on that side of the Atlantic. It is tempting to regard the expansion of “mental hygiene” as a psychiatric discipline across the globe over the next three decades as a direct result of this American example, and thus as a process of the internationalization of psychiatry. Indeed, elsewhere I have developed this very line of analysis in an account that assesses the extent to which we can regard mental hygiene as an international movement during this period. That essay also highlighted some of the limits to such a thesis, and in this chapter I will develop a case regarding the limits of international influence in more detail by looking in depth at the development of mental hygiene as a psychiatric discipline in Britain during the first half of the century.

From the start, within British psychiatric circles there was suspicion of the two foundation stones of the mental hygiene movement in America: it's populist and commercial orientation.