History of psychiatry

The history of psychiatry began in India with the Charaka Samhita which was a book in Sanskrit about medicine. It talks about treating Madness. In Ancient Greece, people normally thought Madness was caused by being cursed by one of the gods, usually Dionysus, or was happening because someone was making a prophecy. But then Democritus and Hippocrates said Madness was caused by physical disease. Democritus experimented on animals to figure out how that worked.

There were still people in Ancient Rome and in the Dark Ages who believed Madness was caused by Demonic possession and could be cured by excorcism.

In Iraq, in the 9th Century, people started to build hospitals called bimaristans which had rooms for people who were violent and insane.

In the 13th Century, people in Christian Europe started to build hospitals for mad people called lunatic asylums but they were used mainly to keep them inside instead of trying to cure them.

In 1621, a man named Robert Burton wrote a book about Madness called The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton said that knowing how the human mind works was the most important thing there was.

In 1758, William Battie wrote a book called Treatise on Madness. He said Madness was caused by physical problems with the Brain and the rest of the Body. He criticized a British hospital called Bedlam for treating mad people badly. In 1789, George III went mad and people in Great Britain started to say that Madness was a disease to be cured. A Quaker named William Tuke said that Insane Asylums were doing a bad job and that they should use therapy instead. Philippe Pinel made the same arguments as Tuke did in France.

In 1808, a German doctor named Johann Christian Reil started to use the word Psychiatry to mean using Medicine and Therapy to treat Madness. Then Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum and Emil Kraepelin started to say that there were different kinds of Madness called Mental Disorders and tried to explain and name different Mental Illnesses.

Some Psychiatrists started to think that Sigmund Freud was right about Psychoanalysis and started to use it. Freud’s ideas got a lot less popular with psychiatrists by the 1970s.

Michel Foucault in his book Madness and Civilization criticizes Psychiatry and says that it’s using science as an excuse to punish people for being different. Thomas Szasz in his book The Myth of Mental Illness, criticizes Psychiatry and says that the concept of Mental illness is only a metaphor and not something that scientifically exists.