Mental Illness Research Paper

Early civilization, primarily the Greeks and Romans, viewed madness as supernaturally inflicted, in which the cosmos and human conditions were caused from naturalistically sources. Illness, at the time, was explained in terms of the four humours: blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy; similarly, to the four seasons. The lack of or excess of one of the four humours led to the person’s illness. Doctors based the humoral system on analogies within the natural world and interconnections between physiology and psychology. This belief of humours being the root cause of mental illness lasted through the Renaissance. It wasn’t until the end seventeenth century, that one philosopher, Rene Descartes, rebuilt the idea of mental illness, where the mind …show more content…
Saint Mary of Bethlehem, or Bedlam, founded in 1247, in London, was one of the first houses to take in mentally ill patients. Asylums became to surge as the number of mad people increased. At first asylums were not made to practice psychiatry but to only house them. “The asylums were not instituted for the practice of psychiatry; psychiatry rather was the practice developed to manage its inmates” (100). It was not until then that doctors gained experience with madness in asylums. One doctor in particular, Dr. Pinel, discovered that insanity should be treated in a moral therapy, combing the psychological practice and reformist thinking. Pinel felt that using physical restraint did little to nothing, to the patient’s health. “Pinel viewed madness as a breakdown of internal, rational discipline, and that the patients moral and psychological facilities needed to be rekindled, so that the external coercion could be supplanted by inner self-control.” (105). Pinel found that by treating the person internally, their external appearance would be fixed also. This idea led to patients to treatments in asylums, since their external environment would be closed off from them, causing them to get