History of Mental Illness

his paper follows the lives of three generations of a Buckland, Massachusetts family, from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The mental illness of one family member, Josiah Spaulding, imprisoned for 57 years in a cage in his parent's and later his sister's home, profoundly affected the experience of his niece Mary Howes, who lived with her caged Uncle for her entire childhood. Mary was one of the first women to graduate from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and took a teaching position in the antebellum south, opening some of the first colleges for women in Alabama. She later became an abolitionist and mental health reformer, along with her son, Dr. Frederick Goddard. The story of Mary's caged uncle intertwined through her whole life. Based on three years of private archival research, this paper contains the previously unheard, but profound story of nineteenth century mental illness and the reform enacted by those lost to history.

Seen as the ‘father of modern psychiatry’ by many in the mental health field, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) was the first to produce a comprehensive classification system of mental disease. Between 1883 and 1927, his highly popular Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (textbook of psychiatry) went through nine editions, in the process isolating distinct forms of psychosis including schizophrenia and manic-depression. Though his somatic approach to mental pathology was eventually succeeded by Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory, Kraepelin’s conceptualization of different mental illnesses as discreet pathological entities has been highly influential on the construction of recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and Mental Disorders (DSM).

Psychoanalysis in the United States reached its golden age in a few decades following World War II. An unprecedented number of middle-class Americans met their psychotherapists in private offices, considering these sessions on a couch a part of modern, urban, and stressful life. The same era brought homosexuality to a heightened scrutiny. Not only psychoanalytic interest in sexuality, but also the culture of conformity in the Cold War era contributed to an increased medical attempt to "cure" homosexuality by changing it into heterosexuality.       
Obscured by this well-known historical narrative is the psychoanalytic practice that took shape in institutional settings before its rise to professional prominence. Indeed, between the 1910s and 1940s, select mental hospitals in the US were staffed by psychoanalytically-minded psychiatrists. These physicians may not have been formally trained by Freud, but their interactions with patients clearly reflected their aspiration to understand relationships among intra-psychic dynamisms, social inhibitions, and symptoms of mental illness. Homosexuality did not escape these doctors' attention, as their in-depth talk therapies revealed its surprising commonality and even its potential normalcy. By shedding light on the rhythm of institutional life at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, one of the progressive mental hospitals that employed psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatrists in the 1920s, this article explores two under-examined aspects of the history of psychiatry: the prevalence of psychoanalytic practices before 1950 in mental hospital settings on the one hand, and the comparatively less-pathologizing clinical approach to homosexual experiences among the era's psychoanalysts, on the other. Such inquiry is inspired by Gerald Grob's scholarship that has delineated the rise and fall of US mental hospitals most definitively. Too, the paper is homage to his (trans-institutional) mentorship, which encouraged a broad range of historical inquiries.

The case of Margaret Heffernan, a twenty-three year old woman sentenced to death for the drowning of her son in 1900, created considerable public debate regarding her guilt. Historians have used Heffernan's case to demonstrate attitudes toward violent mothers in the period, yet the concept of 'madness' and its centrality to Heffernan's case has been overlooked. Heffernan aroused public sympathy, several large petitions for her release, and was eventually granted a commuted sentence of only two years imprisonment due to the public's willingness to attribute her behaviour to madness. An examination of Victorian lunatic asylum committals and public discourses surrounding femininity and 'madness' reveals that Heffernan's case was highly reflective of a culture in which violent women were often deemed irrational.

Muslim immigrants often attribute mental health challenges to a lack of faith, spirit possession, bad karma, or the evil eye (Amri, 2012).
Such negative associations have resulted in the under utilization of psychological and psychiatric services, causing many to go without essential treatment and often unnecessarily struggle with a mental health issue that could be easily resolved with professional help (Aloud & Rathur, 2009; Redmond, Galea, & Delva, 2009).
The development of culturally and religiously sensitive mental health services is essential to support the mental well-being of Muslim clients.
Developing an understanding of the historical contributions of Muslim scholars may help decrease misconceptions and resistance some Muslim clients may have towards the utilization of psychological or psychiatric services. In addition, researchers and practitioners can incorporate these understandings in treatment plans to provide culturally and religiously sensitive services.
This poster will explore some theoretical contributions and treatment practices of Muslim scholars in the field of mental health through the following three time periods: 7th-13th century (i.e., Golden period), 14th-19th century (i.e., Decline period), and the 20th-21st century (i.e., Revival period).
-------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Elzamzamy, K., & Patel, S. (2015, March). Muslim Historical Contributions to Psychological Theories and Treatment. Poster session presented at the seventh annual Muslim Mental Health conference, Dearborn, MI.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first is a brief introduction of various criteria we use to define or distinguish between normality and abnormality. The second, largest part is a history of mental illness from the Stone Age to the 20 th century, with a special emphasis on the recurrence of three causal explanations for mental illness emphasizing supernatural, somatogenic, and psychogenic factors. This part briefly touches upon trephination, the Greek theory of hysteria within the context of the four bodily humors, witch hunts, asylums, moral treatment, mesmerism, and catharsis, the mental hygiene movement, deinstitutionalization, community mental health services, and managed care. The third part concludes with a brief description of the issue of diagnosis.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

Madness is a major disorder of social ties and a universal problem for all societies. The formation and transformation of local treatments of madness are therefore a major area of study within social and cultural anthropology. In this perspective, “treatment” should be understood on three different levels. First, as treatment of the problem that madness poses to social order; Second, as treatment of an ailment on the basis of a therapeutic system that can call upon specialist knowledge or not (e.g. a classification, an etiology, a pharmacopoeia, etc.) in order to identify the disorder or to determine its nature and to then provide the appropriate intervention; Finally, as moral treatment of people experiencing madness and trying to find a solution to their state of disorder.

How did madness, which had been classified as a Wind or demonic illness in most medical treatises until at least the 10th century, come to be attributed almost unfailingly to mucus and Fire by the 14th? This chapter unravels the complicated process by which Wind medicine was displaced and emetics and purgatives replaced moxibustion and apotropaic pharmacy as the main medical treatments for mad behavior. It also explains how physicians used these novel doctrines to affirm their superiority over ritual healers, and how the attribution of insanity to mucus eventually became a culturally ubiquitous way of explaining the failures of human actions and perceptions. Since these momentous shifts took place discreetly and with few controversies on the nature of insanity, my explanations draw on broader trends such as state sponsorship of medicine, increasing interest in the inner mechanisms of illness, and the rising prominence of syncretic approaches to medical learning.

Hallucinations, convulsions, confusion mentale, perte d’énergie, pensées insoutenables, les troubles psychiques posent autant d’énigmes aux médecins qu’aux philosophes. D’où vient le trouble ? Que dit-il de la nature de l’esprit, de la structure de l’âme, de son rapport au corps ? Qui peut y remédier et comment ? Ce livre donne à voir comment ces questions, encore actuelles, ont été formulées au IIe siècle de notre ère, et quelles réponses y ont été apportées.
Suivant le fil rouge de la psychopathologie, il propose une traversée des écrits de Galien de Pergame et offre les clés pour étudier en profondeur sa conception de l’humain comme être vivant et pensant. Écrivain prolifique et polémique, pourvu d’une érudition vaste et précise, Galien a élaboré une pensée singulière. À la croisée de plusieurs traditions intellectuelles, elle est parcourue d’autant de certitudes que d’hésitations, et parfois de tensions pour nous déconcertantes. L’âme est un de ces sujets délicats. En l’abordant par l’angle des maladies, ce livre s’attache à montrer comment les thèses du philosophe et les explications du médecin, suivies pas à pas, s’articulent en un propos complexe et nuancé. La démarche théorique de Galien, la question de l’existence d’une catégorie médicale du trouble psychique, sa symptomatologie, son étiologie et enfin sa prise en charge sont ainsi présentées et discutées. Problème crucial d’histoire et d’épistémologie de la médecine, la question des troubles psychiques apporte un éclairage nouveau sur la pensée du médecin de Pergame, aussi prudente qu’on la savait emphatique ou péremptoire, et toute entière investie de l’exigence du soin.

For many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, “disease” and “illness” are not equivalent. Whereas “disease” denotes the physician’s ostensibly objective criteria, “illness” emphasizes the patient’s subjective experience. This dissertation examines that distinction precisely at a point where it breaks down, in the history of a diagnosis called “anosognosia,” also known as the denial of illness.
    In the 1890s, Austrian psychiatrist Gabriel Anton observed a number of patients who denied being blind, deaf, or paralyzed. “That is just how it is,” a patient demurred, “one sees better in youth.” The question to Anton was, were such patients truly unaware of their loss or did they sense it on some level, if only to deny it?
    The history of Anton’s syndrome, later named “anosognosia” by the French neurologist Joseph Babinski, spans more than a century and a half across two continents and through both world wars. I treat its history as a special type of lens to focus on some of the broader intellectual and professional differences between neurology and psychiatry. I argue that the clinical perception and portrayal of this apparent loss of the patient’s experience depended on historical patterns of thinking about the distinction between conscious and unconscious perception as well as categories of health and disease. To think about the denial of illness was to think about the very meaning of illness and awareness, and the difference, if any, between the mind and the brain.

This article surveys judicial practices, medical doctrines, and ritual therapies surrounding madness (kuang, diankuang, dian, feng) in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). Even without psychiatry and specialized institutions like mental asylums, Chinese people of that era possessed a rich array of ways to discuss crazy behavior, mad words, and insane people. For the first time, the legal system began to treat homicides committed in a state of madness as a distinct kind of crime. These new laws in turn stirred debates on how to control mad men and women and led to the first policy calling for the preventive confinement of mad persons in Chinese history. Meanwhile, physicians speculated on the causes of madness, which they understood chiefly as a behavioral disorder. They attributed mad symptoms mainly to phlegm and inner fire, but also sometimes to depletion, and treated patients with emetics, purgatives, or tonics (sometimes in combination) depending on the cause they identified. Scattered evidence also exists about how madness was handled in less literate circles, often but not always through religious ritual. Note that ritual treatments were important in all social groups, including among highly educated physicians. Though some physicians attributed possession symptoms to the action of phlegm, many also believed in ghosts and used a mix of medical and ritual methods to expel the possessing agent.

Mental illness has long been a part of human history; however, not as long as humans have been using plants for medicinal purposes. Medicinal plants are the source of over 50% of our medications today. Several countries integrate traditional systems of medicine (homeopathic medicine) with international systems of medicine. However, the presence of medicinal plants for anxiolytic and anti-depressant medications is sorely lacking. This is despite a 30-year gap between the last new medications for anxiety and depressive disorders and the availability of ketamine in 2019. Several gaps and lack of access to research regarding the potential benefits of using medicinal plants as anxiolytic and antidepressant solutions create even more difficulties for researchers. In addition to this, the cost of development associated with creating new medications within this field of medicine is incredibly resource and time-intensive. Despite this level of stagnation pharmaceutical companies are still hesitant to approach medicinal plants and phytochemicals as potential sources of pharmaceutical interest. A hesitancy that seems to be echoed by several nations despite the vast amounts of money lost due to symptoms caused by anxiety and depressive disorders. This paper takes an in-depth look at all the issues listed above and more, analyzing the merit of researching/using medicinal plants for anxiolytic and antidepressant purposes, in the past, present, and potentially the future.

This article reviews historical and current examples of harmful and forced treatments as well as scientific discrimination that have been applied to people diagnosed with mental illness. It discusses anti-psychiatric social action in North America from 1970 to the present. A review of social work's foundations in social justice, empowerment, and person-in-the-environment perspectives highlights the congruencies and communal benefits for both the social work profession and psychiatric-survivor movements. Through this discussion, it is apparent that the professed values of the social work profession are actually more compatible with psychiatric-survivor movements than with any allegiances to the biomedical model of psychiatry.

Ubicato presso l’omonima chiesa cagliaritana, nell’odierna via Manno, l’ospedale S. Antonio di Lapola è attestato nelle fonti dal 1338. Punto di riferimento sanitario per tutta l’area cagliaritana, e grazie all’impegno dei Fatebenefratelli, dal 1685 si contano circa 1.800 ricoveri all’anno.  L’ospedale ottiene una nuova organizzazione con il Regolamento del 1776, nel quale si stabilisce che tutti i poveri possono essere ricoverati nella struttura ad eccezione «dei portatori di malattie contagiose e gli incurabili», ovvero gli scorbutici, i tisici, gli scrofolosi, i rachitici, gli epilettici, gli scabiosi, «gli ostrutti senza febbre», i podagrosi e «i posseduti da stillicidio inveterato o d’altri mali abituali». I pazzi incurabili e curabili, invece, dovevano essere tutti soccorsi: «i primi per toglierli dall’occasione di nuocere ad altri o a se stessi; li secondi per lo stesso motivo per guarirgli ancora». La sensibilità sociale vede infatti la malattia mentale come un problema di ordine pubblico. L’internamento è, nell’Europa del XVII-XVIII secolo, sostenuto da esigenze di sicurezza. Ma, spiega Foucault, l’Ancien Régime è animato dal sentimento morale che tenta di correggere e reprimere, e per il quale si mettono a disposizione «prigioni e segrete». Nel suo piccolo, la Cagliari della Restaurazione post angioiana - coinvolta nella vita della corte sabauda rifugiatasi in Sardegna per sfuggire all’invasione di Napoleone Bonaparte e ancora lontana dai Lumi che ormai brillano nel vecchio continente - dedica ai pazzi un apposito ambiente detto ‘Stufa’. Nel 1799 Filippo Maria Tomasi, sacerdote e segretario, inizia la compilazione dei registri di ingresso. L’unico registro oggi accessibile è quello delle donne, preso in esame nel saggio.

Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills—from dysfunctional marriage and family dynamics to the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism—were at the root of mental illness. Staub chronicles the surge in influence of socially attuned psychodynamic theories along with the rise of radical therapy and psychiatric survivors’ movements. He shows how the theories of antipsychiatry held unprecedented sway over an enormous range of medical, social, and political debates until a bruising backlash against these theories—part of the reaction to the perceived excesses and self-absorptions of the 1960s—effectively distorted them into caricatures. Throughout, Staub reveals that at stake in these debates of psychiatry and politics was nothing less than how to think about the institution of the family, the nature of the self, and the prospects for, and limits of, social change.

The memorialisation of expeditions has become an increasingly contested issue in public life both in Australia and internationally. While Antarctica may seem peripheral to these debates, which usually focus on colonial legacies and indigenous dispossession, Australia’s sizeable territorial claim on the continent means that it too must be incorporated into the conversation. In this regard, the stories through which Australians’ early experiences of Antarctica are remembered are important components of the nation’s geopolitical imaginary. Early Australian exploration of Antarctic has popularly been viewed through a frame of heroic masculinity centred on Douglas Mawson, the leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911-14. Despite a recent widening of this view, aspects of the expedition that challenge this perspective are still neglected.

This paper focuses on Sidney Jeffryes, a radio operator on Mawson’s expedition whose world-first achievement of wireless connection between the two continents was overshadowed by his mental illness and subsequent incarceration. Seen as an embarrassment to the expedition, until recently he has been largely written out of Australian Antarctic history. The paper draws on a collaboration between a literary studies scholar, a historian and a psychologist to examine Jeffryes’ experiences in Antarctica and on his return, contextualizing them within the power relations of the expedition, and class, gender and colonial discourses of early twentieth-century Australia. We argue that Jeffryes’ story has a call on our attention because, in addition to its own compelling narrative, it enables us to challenge the heroic stereotype that has dominated the memorialisation of Australian Antarctic history.

Mental illness has long been a part of human history; however, not as long as humans have been using plants for medicinal purposes. Medicinal plants are the source of over 50% of our medications today. Several countries integrate traditional systems of medicine (homeopathic medicine) with international systems of medicine. However, the presence of medicinal plants for anxiolytic and anti-depressant medications is sorely lacking. This is despite a 30-year gap between the last new medications for anxiety and depressive disorders and the availability of ketamine in 2019. Several gaps and lack of access to research regarding the potential benefits of using medicinal plants as anxiolytic and antidepressant solutions create even more difficulties for researchers. In addition to this, the cost of development associated with creating new medications within this field of medicine is incredibly resource and time-intensive. Despite this level of stagnation pharmaceutical companies are still hesitant to approach medicinal plants and phytochemicals as potential sources of pharmaceutical interest. A hesitancy that seems to be echoed by several nations despite the vast amounts of money lost due to symptoms caused by anxiety and depressive disorders. This paper takes an in-depth look at all the issues listed above and more, analyzing the merit of researching/using medicinal plants for anxiolytic and antidepressant purposes, in the past, present, and potentially the future.

In this paper I will put side by side insights from medicine about lovesickness and plays featuring sufferers from the disease, written by the two Dutch poets and playwrights Gerbrand Adriaensz. Bredero (1585) and Theodore Rodenburgh (1574-1644).

The bishop of Huesca Juan Alonso of Aragon and Navarre (1459–1526) had been praised by historiography until Durán Gudiol proposed a possible mental deficiency as a key to explain the stagnation of his ecclesiastical career. Through of a severe conductive conflict that took place between 1491 and 1495, as well as dismantling the main qualities attributed to him, it is confirmed the scarce capacity for public life that this prelate had, very possibly due to his limited intelligence. This raises an important problem as it was what position should be granted to a royal blood person, nephew of Ferdinand the Catholic, but who lacked skills. The solution was ostracize him for 40 years from the political, ecclesiastical and family circles.

El obispo de Huesca Juan Alonso de Aragón y Navarra (1459–1526) fue una figura elogiada por la historiografía hasta que Durán Gudiol propuso una posible deficiencia mental como clave para explicar el estancamiento de su carrera eclesiástica. Mediante un conflicto conductual severo que tuvo lugar entre 1491 y 1495, así como desmontando las principales cualidades atribuidas a su persona, se confirma la escasa capacidad para la vida pública que tuvo el prelado, muy posiblemente fruto de su limitada inteligencia. Se plantea así un problema bastante importante como fue qué papel otorgar a un miembro de sangre real, sobrino de Fernando el Católico, pero sin aptitudes. La solución fue marginarlo durante 40 años de los círculos cortesano, político, eclesiástico, y en última instancia, familiar.

I have been assigned to get vital information out to the world and so I pray that my work is pleased by God and only God, but the good news has to be shared with my country and it seems to me that things are getting worse in 2016, in my country and I am so proud of the great United States, but so sad that people are not taking better care of their own health and believe anything the media shows them, believes what man tells you about your own body, etc.
So, let’s begin to reverse our country’s sickness and live for living for our children in the United States and have faith in God’s healing food, and let’s begin to use our common sense which God gave to each and everyone of us to use not only for ourselves, but to help and share with others.  I truly do believe this is where and when we get our blessings of the world!

In this Paper I examine Wittgenstein’s appeals to madness in On Certainty in light of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. A close look at these works, usually conceived as disparate, belonging to entirely different schools of thought, reveals they actually have much in common. Both can be read as investigations into the grounds of reason, and while they offer quite different and distinct perspectives on the matter, share some central insights. In both we find that the boundaries of reason are not only vague but are also largely founded upon the relations - social in Foucault, socio-linguistic in Wittgenstein - between the reasonable man and the unreasonable man. Both perspectives reveal a curious state of affairs, whereby the reasonable man is the one who dominates discourse, and yet, in his claim for reason, remains forever dependent upon the unreasonable man and his rejection. The pressing question triggered by Foucault's account is whether the boundary between reason and unreason is at all necessary. This undermines Wittgenstein’s thesis that this boundary is a matter of logical necessity, upon which discourse depends. I flesh this point out in the paper also by examining the differences in Wittgenstein’s and Foucalt’s treatments of Descartes’ Meditations. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Cartesian skepticism presented in On Certainty loses much of its fortitude once examined in light of Foucault's Histoire de la folie.

La ricerca sulla patologia depressiva nelle epoche passate ha spesso sofferto l’assenza di una ricostruzione storica e culturale, fondamentale per comprendere il fenomeno nella sua interezza. Nell’ambizione di superare questo limite, la nostra ricerca si è incentrata su descrizioni di ordine presumibilmente depressivo contenute nei documenti sardi del XI-XV secolo, e sul confronto con gli studi effettuati in ambito mediterraneo. L’intento è di collocare la medicina basso-medievale sarda nel prospetto della storia della medicina mediterranea, valutando la visione medica, religiosa e popolare della depressione nel contesto sardo e individuando le influenze apportate dalle diverse culture. Questo percorso ha reso necessario evidenziare in che modo alcune illustri antecedenti della nostra depressione (la ‘melancolia’ greca traghettata al mondo occidentale da arabi ed ebrei, l’’accidia’ monastica, il peccato di ‘tristitia’ e il ‘tedium vitae’ latino) si sono incontrate nel bacino mediterraneo, rilanciando il valore di una comune eredità culturale. Lo spoglio della documentazione ha evidenziato da un lato l’individuazione di un percorso terapeutico ― influenzato dalla saggezza popolare e dall’autorevolezza dei medici stranieri presenti sull’isola ― e dall’altro l’evoluzione dell’approccio rispetto alle declinazioni del sentimento di tristezza, ossia le variazioni nel tempo di quella che attualmente viene categorizzata come patologia. In quest’ottica assumono una nuova dimensione le parole usate nelle descrizioni, l’atteggiamento di comprensione o di condanna verso una condizione esistenziale dallo status alterno di malattia o peccato. L’esame attento dei documenti ha consentito di rileggere storie precedentemente interpretate in chiave politico-economica rivalutandone il ruolo, ed evidenziando come la descrizione di un evento psico-fisico venga interpretato secondo lo schema del momento in cui si verifica. La condizione di cerniera tra ‘soma’ e ‘psiche’ propria di melancolia e accidia riflette da una parte la concezione che le varie epoche affidano alle due dimensioni e l’interazione che si presume tra esse, dall’altra le specificità locali frutto dell’integrazione tra le scelte dell’egemonia culturale, proveniente dall’alto, e le particolarità dell’area specifica. Lo studio si propone inoltre di restituire al pubblico alcuni cardini della cultura medievale del Mediterraneo, in un intricato sistema di fonti, traduzioni e interpretazioni che mette in gioco aspetti focali dell’identità, come cultura, religione, salute, in una lettura non aspecifica ma attentamente calibrata alla singola realtà.