Mental illness is a matter of certain behaviors which have been observed through history and which have been identified as being out of the norm. At different times they have been identified as sin, madness, insanity, or a medical condition. Our conceptions of mental illness have changed many times, and in "The Historical Constitution of Mental Illness" the nature of our view of this issue is explored. It was only recently, says the author, when the Western world accorded madness the status of mental illness.
In an earlier era, the madman was seen as someone possessed by demons, as if an outside force had invaded the normal mind and pushed out the existing personality in favor of the manifestations of madness. The medical models hold that the madman of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was an undiagnosed mental patient, and that the way such a person was viewed was governed then by a network of religious and magical beliefs:
According to this view, it was only with the arrival of the calm, objective, scientific gaze of modern medicine that what had previously been regarded as a supernatural perversion was seen as a deterioration of nature (64).
Yet the author finds that this is not entirely the case and that at least since the time of the Greeks there was a certain sense of madness as a pathology and that there had always been medical treatment of madness in the West.
The degree of balance found between the idea of madness as demonic and as medical has varied through history. The author traces this from period to period and points to some of the different treatments for madness, from exorcism to internment, with the latter sometimes serving as punishment and sometimes as medical treatment.
The author next considers madness as an overall structure, trying to ascertain the meaning of madness and finding that what we call mental illness is actually alienated madness, a madness alienated in the psychology that...