It was believe that with doing this it would release all the evil and troubles would be able to leave the patient in this crude manner. This operation is now known as “trephining” (Butcher, Mineka, & Hooley, 2007). After the fall of Rome, superstitious views dominated popular thinking about mental disorders for over 1,000 years. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people’s behavior that was associated with mental illness was believed to be possessed by the devil and endured being tortured to rid the demon from the individual. From the turn of the eighteenth century into the twentieth century, mental illness was viewed as being beyond the individual’s control.
So, too, are hallucinations. Nor does raising such questions deny the existence of the personal anguish that is often associated with “mental illness.” Anxiety and depression exist. Psychological suffering exists. But normality and abnormality, sanity and insanity, and the diagnoses that flow from them may be less substantive than many believe them to be. At its heart,
This created the M’Naghten rule, which held that a man is not responsible for his criminal acts, when, because of a “disease of the mind,” he does not know the “nature and quality” of his acts or does not know they are “wrong.” The courts used the M’Naghten rule for some time as the determination factor in cases where the insanity defense was their plea. Because of its broad definition and criteria, the M’Naghten rule adopted many forms over the years. Cases like Durham v. United States help the rule form the “product of mental illness” approach. The test named Durham product test created an assessment for insanity based on a substantial lack of mental capacity
What makes disorders from the mind different is that they affect how people behave. Ancient people believed that mental illness or abnormal behavior was the result of someone being “possessed” by evil spirits. Treatment, if any, came in the form of amulets or charms, or more drastically, by drilling holes into the head so those spirits could escape. In the middle ages, the church saw mental illness or abnormal behaviors as a sign of the devil at work, a belief that led to the persecution of people as witches. Doctors however, viewed as unbalance in the four humors (fluids believed to make up the body).
This is when particularly powerful people such as doctors, politicians and the mass media label those deemed as abnormal, as mentally ill, as their behaviour is ‘unnatural’ and ‘bizarre’ which cannot be explained. Examples of abnormal behaviour would be homosexuality and teenage pregnancy; mostly as they are not traditionalistic views. Szasz’s views are similar to Scheff’s but he also comments on that mental illness in society is deemed as a problem, as it lies with the attitudes of other people, and not the behaviour itself. Rosenhan is a social psychologist that conducted an experiment of ‘being sane in insane places’. His experiment involved him and other participants faking a mental illness (schizophrenia) to get entry to the psychiatric hospital as patients, and then seeing how long it took the medical professionals to figure out that they weren’t actually insane or mentally ill. Later on, after Rosenhan and his participants were released by his lawyers, Rosenhan got into
A myth is unconsciously created by and believed by many people and is usually told to explain an occurrence. A lie is something untrue that a single person came up with, having the intention of deceiving others. Since the term mental illness is widely held and attempts to give an explanation, I believe Szasz chose to use the word “myth” and not “lie” in this essay. When comparing mental health and physical health, Szasz points out that unlike physical symptoms, metal symptoms involve someone making a judgment. Mental symptoms are determined in a social context.
According to Hansell and Damour (2008), abnormal behaviors in the primitive time were considered coming from evil spirits that took over a person’s body. The mentally ill were considered to be possessed by malevolent spirits and, therefore, treated through two cruel methods, 1) trephining or cutting of a hole in the skull of a live person believing that the evil spirit will exit through this hole and 2) exorcism or casting out of evil spirits by religious leaders. Ancient Greeks and the Romans did not believe in evil forces to be the cause of abnormal behaviors. They
Based on NIMH’S information on the types and signs of mental illness, Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, can be checked for many of the disorders such as borderline personality, bipolar/sexual, and ADHD (NIMH). This text gives an inside look on the on-going war in Holden’s mind and shows just how mental illness can really jumble someone’s psychology. Even though it would be easy for us to blame Holden for being the cause of his own failure, we cannot condone the traumatizing past that Holden had to go through and the psychological problems that Holden has no control over. A person with borderline personality disorder is someone that is mentally unstable and shows symptoms of extreme reactions, disturbing and depressing thoughts (Borderline personality disorder/NIMH).
However, Durkheim rejected this theory for two reasons; one, there is no concrete proof to show the existence of monomania, second, mental functions are completely dependent on one another, and insanity is present in one area, then it should also be present in another as well, that is if insanity affects one function it should affect at the other functions as well. Therefore the concept of monomania, where an individual displays normal behavior in every other action but shows absolute abnormality in just one particular action is unacceptable and therefore the idea that insanity causes suicide does not hold true according to Durkheim Suicide And Normal Psychological Conditions , Heritance: Durkheim then turns his attention to normal psychological conditions such as race, nationality and heredity to which psychologists attributed suicide to. He believed that to sociologically define race was a difficult task yet he studied the theory given by Morselli regarding race and its effects on suicidal tendencies. Morselli identified four groups on the basis of suicidal rates, put them in descending order and concluded that the Germans had the highest rate of suicides, then came
Both characters however are entrapped mentally to some extent, by their own minds and exhibit signs of madness. Madness is presented to some extent as constructed in both ‘Hamlet’ and ‘One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’- although Othello’s madness seems slightly real. Foucault’s theory of mental illness and institutions is that mental illness does not exist (This extract is seen in A general introduction to psychoanalysis) - it is rather a social construct and used to control