Psychiatry: Medical School Crash Course

History of Psychiatry The first topic is that of the history of psychiatry. Psychiatry is the study of mental illnesses. People have studied psychiatry for many millennia, and there are records of mental illnesses being written about since the ancient times. Ancient Greek doctors and medicine men from prehistoric times dealt with mental illnesses although there were no treatments for mental diseases. This first section talks about the history of psychiatry and what people did to understand and treat mental disorders from the ancient times to modern times.

In this section, we will discuss the history of psychiatry. Mental illness dates to prehistory; however, it wasn’t until the year 1808 that the term “psychiatry” was first developed. The word was first developed by a professor by the name of Johann Christian Reil. He wrote a paper that used the word “psychiatry” in it. It comes from two Greek words, which are psyche, which means soul or mind and iatros, which means physician.

Throughout human history, mental disorders were believed to be of supernatural origin. This means that the mentally ill were believed to be under the possession of evil spirits. Many treatments during this era were based on sorcery and magic. A common cure for mental disorders was exorcism.

The first hospitals for the treatment of mental disorders were developed in the eighth century in Islamic countries. In modern times, psychiatry was practiced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Mental health hospitals started to use humane treatments for mentally ill patients in the nineteenth century. This is when psychiatry was first seen as a field of medicine. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that drugs were developed to treat psychiatric disorders.

The earliest textbooks on mental disorders came from ancient India. One textbook came from the Ayurvedic textbook, called the Charaka Samhita. The first hospital for treating mental disorders was built in India in the third century BCE. The Greeks also wrote about mental disorders. In the fourth century BCE, Hippocrates believed that physiological problems in the body were the cause of mental disorders. Hippocrates visited Democritus, who was cutting up animals in his garden. Democritus told Hippocrates that he was cutting animals to find the cause of melancholy and mental illness. Democritus wrote a book on melancholy and mental illness and Hippocrates came to believe that there were physiological changes that caused mental illness.

During the fifth century BCE, emotional disorders, particularly psychoses, were believed to be of supernatural origin. This was the belief that continued through the time of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Rome. Egyptians also believed that mental illness was supernatural. Teachers of religion used exorcism and other barbaric methods to treat mental disorders.

In ancient Islamic countries, research was done in the areas of psychology and psychiatry. There were many papers written about mental diseases. A man by the name of Abu Zayd al-Balkhi wrote a textbook on neurotic disorders in the ninth century. He believed that there were four kinds of emotional disorders. They included fear, anger, sadness, and obsession. Abu Zayd al-Balkhi divided depression into three categories. These included normal depression, endogenous depression that came from inside the body, and reactive depression, that came from outside the body.

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