Throughout history,
people have always tried to classify, explain and understand what we now term
as abnormal behaviour In olden times, supernatural explanations were given for
the various abnormal disorders such as OCD, Alzheimer’s, and Dementia etc. and mostly
passed of as the wrath of gods. Traditionally abnormal behavior has been
explained in mystical terms, scientific terms, and more recently in humanistic
terms.
In medieval times, the
supernatural explanation was the most common way to deal with abnormal
behavior. Exorcisms were performed routinely, in order to release ‘malevolent’
spirits from the afflicted or cursed individual. Some people would be branded
as ‘witches’ and propagators of witchcraft, and then exiled from society.
People labeled witches were often hunted mercilessly and out to death. ‘Mad
houses’ were also common throughout medieval societies, filled with people with
such abnormal behaviors.
These mental asylums
started as early as the 16th century, according to the records of history. It
dates back to 1547, when King Henry VIII of England established the St. Mary of
Bethelem asylum for the mentally insane. These mad homes became ridiculously
popular during this period, and even the Renaissance era. However, these
asylums were not the asylums of today. In the asylums, patients were treated as
outcasts, vagabonds, and foul beasts that were barely human, and were kept
locked away from the rest of the world. These patients were also usually handed
over for live experiments, to satisfy the scientific curiosity of some people.
Code
of Hammurabi
In ancient Mesopotamia,
the king of Babylon, Hammurabi, made the first known written laws of the world,
in 1700 BC, some 3700 years back. His laws included laws that dealt with
illnesses of that time, laws that physicians had to follow for while treating
patients. Punishments were given out to those who failed to treat the wounded
properly, as well as rewards for successful work. It is the world’s first known
laws to deal with the treatment for people. In ancient Mesopotamia,
supernatural elements were given as the reason for many abnormal behaviors,
meaning that quite a staggering amount of unlucky physicians lost their limbs
during his rule. The earliest form of surgery was also prevalent during these times,
a process known as trephining, in which a physician would drill a hole in the
skull of the cursed or afflicted person, in order to release the malevolent
spirits from the person’s body. Evidence of this can be found in the skulls of
these ancient people, with visible drill marks.
Greek
and Roman empires
During the next 1000
years or so, as science slowly developed, scientific causes for abnormal
behaviors started to find their voices. In the Greek and Roman empires,
scientific approaches started to find their way, but the mystical and
supernatural elements were still considered dominant, and the people
propagating the scientific methods were often put to death or exiled from the
society. These people were people
accursed by the Church and denounced in the names of god and men. Some of the
prominent early scientific method connoisseurs were Plato, who argued in the
favour of the environmental factors causing various illnesses, Hippocrates, who
studied the brain and tried to explain that various mental disorders had their
roots in the brain.
1500
AD onwards
Galen, a Greek
physician who attended the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, adopted Hippocrates'
teachings and is credited with discovering that arteries carried blood, not
air,, as was formerly believed. Johann
Weyer, a Belgian physician during the period of the Renaissance, took up the
cause of Hippocrates and Galen by arguing that abnormal behavior and thought
patterns were caused by physical problems.
Only from the 18th-19th
century onwards, have concrete efforts been made to scientifically understand abnormal
behavior, using humanistic perspectives as well. Laws were made to convert the
mad houses or asylums into actual proper centers where the afflicted would be
given attention, following general public outrage at this. These people had
been kept chained and in shackles to prevent them from escaping to the outside
world, but were now kept in the emerging hospitals.
In 1789 Vincenzo
Chiarugi, started to improve the asylum he owned in Florence. He introduced sanitary
and hygienic measures, which made the place cleaner and improved the general
living conditions. During this century, these insane asylums rapidly became
health care centers, all across Europe.
Humanistic
era
The humanitarian
treatment of patients received great impetus from the work of Philippe Pinel
(1745–1826) in France. In 1792, shortly after the first phase of the French
Revolution, Pinel was in charge in Paris. In this capacity, he received the
grudging permission of the Revolutionary Commune to remove the chains from some
of the inmates as an experiment to test his views that mental patients should
be treated with kindness and consideration as sick people, not as vicious. The
monastery of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London became an asylum for the mentally
ill in the reign of King Henry the VIII during the sixteenth century. The
hospital, known as “Bedlam,” became infamous for its deplorable conditions and practices
“(Robert, Butcher, Hooley, & Mineka, 2007).
William Tuke's work : “At about the same
time that Pinel was reforming, an English Quaker named William Tuke (1732–1822)
established the York Retreat, a pleasant country house where mental patients lived,
worked, and rested in a kindly, religious atmosphere (Narby, 1982). This
retreat represented the culmination of a noble battle against the brutality,
ignorance, and indifference of Tuke’s time. The Quaker retreat at York has
continued to provide humane mental health treatment for over 200 years
(Borthwick, Holman, et al., 2001), even though the mental hospital movement
spawned by its example evolved into large mental hospitals that became crowded
and often offered less-than-humane treatment in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century’s” (Robert, Butcher, Hooley, & Mineka, 2007).
Great technological
discoveries occurred both home and abroad in the latter years of the nineteenth
century. There are four dimensions in abnormal psychology that spanned the
nineteenth and twentieth century’s and generated powerful influences on our
contemporary perspectives in abnormal behaviour:
1) Biological discoveries.
2) Development of a
classification system for mental disorders.
3) The emergence of
psychological causation views and
4) Experimental
psychological research developments.
BIOLOGICAL
DISCOVERIES: Establishing the Link
between the Brain and Mental Disorder.
References
Robert, Butcher, Hooley, & Mineka. (2007). Abnormal Psychology (13th edition ed.). Pearson Education and Dorling Kindersley Publishing.
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