The survivor story behind the green ribbon.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s marked with a green ribbon. You’ll see that ribbon pinned to the lapels of news anchors and mental health spokesmen, or on social media badges. It means: mental health conditions are part of the human range, and the people living with them are one of us. I see you. I’m not looking away.
It used to mean the opposite.
In the 1800s, what were then called insane asylums used to dress their inmates in green uniforms. The color green was used to label people as “insane,” a term which in itself was a mark of shame.
In 1900, a young Yale graduate named Clifford Beers attempted suicide by jumping from a fourth-story window. For his own protection, his family had him committed. Beers spent the next three years in Connecticut psychiatric institutions, both state-run and private. In them, he was beaten by attendants, confined in straitjackets for weeks at a time, and held in freezing rooms and isolation cells. The people charged with his care abused him, repeatedly, while the institutions that employed them looked the other way.
In 1903, when Beers was finally released, he wrote it all down. The memoir he published in 1908, A Mind That Found Itself, named the orderlies who had assaulted him, and described the conditions he lived in. It showed how mental institutions were, in practical terms, torture facilities operating with state approval. It made the case that mental illness deserved treatment, not punishment.
Beers’ memoir went on to become one of the most consequential books in American medical history. It changed public opinion. Prominent physicians, philanthropists, and journalists took up its cause. Reform legislation followed in multiple states. Within a year of publication, Beers had founded the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene. The following year, he joined philosopher William James and psychiatrist Adolf Meyer to co-found the National Committee for Mental Hygiene: the organization that, over the decades, became Mental Health America. In 1949, MHA founded Mental Health Awareness Week, which by the late 60s expanded to include the full month of May.
In the 1990s, when mental health advocates chose green as their symbol, they were not picking a random color. They were reclaiming it.
Mental Health Awareness Month exists because one survivor told the truth about what had been done to him, and refused to let the people who had done it control the narrative.
That’s the oldest story in our movement. A person is harmed by someone with power over them. They are told, implicitly or explicitly, to stay quiet. They speak anyway. What they name publicly changes what the next survivor has to face alone.
Beers’s argument was that awareness is only the beginning. What matters is what awareness produces: reform, regulation, community support, and above all, recovery as a possibility rather than a mere fantasy. Mental Health America’s 2026 slogan, More Good Days, Together, names the same goal.
That is what STAR Network exists to build: an infrastructure for recovery. A fellowship of people who have walked the same road, and found the way forward together.
If you are wearing the green ribbon this month, thank you. If you are ready to do more than wear it, we invite you to join us, and make recovery real.
May 1–4: The All-STAR Community Cruise
A four-day healing retreat at sea with survivors of toxic abusive relationships and the people who love them. Time in a place where the phone doesn’t ring, with people who speak your language. Register here.
May 22: Scars to STARs Summit
The third annual global summit, free and virtual, open to anyone with an internet connection. This year’s theme is The ACEs Next 30 Years, honoring Dr. Vincent Felitti and Dr. Robert Anda, whose 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences study changed how science understands trauma. On May 22, we carry that conversation forward.
Register at scarstostarsday.org.
Or join a TAR Anon® meeting here.
