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.

There were hospitals for mental diseases created in Baghdad in 705 AD. Hospitals were built in the early eighth century in the city of Fes and in the city of Cairo. Specialist hospitals included the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London. They were built starting in the thirteenth century to treat mental conditions but only housed mental patients and did not treat them.

Eventually, the attitudes toward mentally ill patients began to change. Treatments became more compassionate. In the year 1758, an English doctor named William Battie wrote a paper called the Treatise on Madness that discussed the management of mental disorders. It reviewed the treatment methods used at the Bethlem Hospital, where patients were treated for mental disorders using barbaric methods. Battie was not happy about these types of treatments and believed that treatment should include maintaining patient friendliness, giving them good food, providing fresh air, and keeping family and friends away from the patients. Battie believed that mental disorders came from dysfunctions in the brain and body instead of in the mind.

Another breakthrough came in the year 1795, when a man by the name of Tony Robert-Fleury ordered that chains be removed from female mental patients at the Paris Asylum. Two other physicians, Phillipe Pinel and William Tuke, advocated for humane treatment of mental patients. One of the treatment methods was to allow patients to move around outside. Instead of dungeons, patients were placed in sunny rooms that were well ventilated.

A student of Phillipe Pinel known as Jean Esquirol, developed ten new mental hospitals that were based on the same principles of humane treatment for the mentally ill. While many doctors tried to stop the use of physical restraint of patients, it was used widely throughout the nineteenth century. At the Lincoln Asylum, located in England, a doctor by the name of Robert Gardiner Hill developed a treatment method for many types of mental patients that eliminated the use of physical restraints.

In 1838, France created a law that regulated admissions to asylums in England. In the nineteenth century, there was a big effort in England that modified the laws to make the treatment of the mentally ill more humane. Asylums needed to have written rules about the treatment of mental patients and they were required to have a qualified physician on staff. In the United States, the first mental asylum was built in New York in 1850. Following that, many other states built mental hospitals in the 1850s and 1860s that were designed to cure and not just house mental patients.

Around 1800, France and England had only a few hundred patients in mental asylums. By the early 1900s, this number rose to many hundreds of thousands of patients. This was because doctors felt that mental illness needed to be treated in institutions. There was an increase in the numbers of patients treated so that asylums became nothing more than institutions that housed the mentally insane with few treatments given.

By the early part of the 1800s, psychiatry was advanced to the point where mental illnesses included mood disorders, delusions, and irrationality. By the twentieth century, there were different ideas regarding the origin of mental disorders. Ideas began to evolve that involved the idea that mental illnesses were all biologically caused. Psychiatry became a combination of neurology and neuropsychiatry. Sigmund Freud made forward advances in psychiatry by developing psychoanalytic theories used to treat mental patients. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory began to be used by other psychiatrists who treated patients in their offices instead of in asylums. Fewer patients were treated in