gudrunorut

The first time people tried to define mental illness was in the Stone Age. They believed that people that behaved in an unusual way were posssessed by evil spirits. The techniques they used in order to "heal" theese people, were methods like prayer, incantation (magisk formel) and magic. If these, quite harmless methods didn`t work, they had to adopt toother, more extreme methods. Flogging (prygel), starving, burning and causing the person to bleed profusely were frequent forms of treatment.

But also the Chinese were early with trying to define the cause of mental illness. They believed that the body contained a positive and a negative side. If these sides were in imbalance, it could lead to illness, including insanity (precursor of Freud?) The ancient Chinse also believed that emotions could be caused when "vital air" flows on specific organs. For example: Sorrow was caused when air flowed into the lungs and anger was caused then air flowed on  the liver.

With Hippocrates, the first medical perspective arose. He believed that unusual behaviour were the result of disturbance in the balance of body fluids. Hippocrates with friends agued that  a pleasent surrounding, exercise, proper diet, massage and soothing baths were the best methods to cure people with psychological diseases. Many individuals were even cared for in temples dedicated to the gods of healing.

Unfortunately, this progressive view of mental illness, did not continue. During the middle age the mentally ill were considered to be in league with Satan and that they were in possess of supernatural, evil powers. They, therefore believed that beating, starving and torturing the mentally ill served to punish the devil. This is closely related to the witchcraft trials.

In the late Middle Ages, asylums were build in orderto cope with the mentally ill. The asylums were nothing but a horrible prison, treating them more like animals than like human beings.  Thanks to a man called Pinel, who disagreed with the methods that were being  used in the prisons, things started changing. He discovered that "patients" or more correctly, "prisoners", that were consdered to be "helpless cases", when removed from their restraints, placed in clean, sunny rooms, and treated kindly improved enough to leave the asylum.

For all of you who is intrested to read more about the development of treatments for people with mental illnessess, Clifford Beers was a very important person in the 20:th century. He educated the people about what mental illness actually was (He had himself been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age)He, therefore, wrote a book called "A mind that found itself" (I love the titel) about his disease and his recovering, in order to make people understand more about mental illness.

That was some of what I am doing in school! Very intresting!