History of Mental Illness & Control of Women

The history of the treatment of mental illness is in large part the history of humanityÆs theories about the causes of mental illness. Mental illness has always been, and is still, viewed by the general populace as something different from physical illness. A physically ill person is still the same person, and is treated as such. A mentally ill person has often been considered to be a different person, and sometimes not a person, that is, not human.

In the ancient world, the commonly accepted explanation for mental illness and for many other illnesses was that the person had been possessed by an evil spirit. It was also often believed that such a person was at least partly responsible for such a possession, by having done something that allowed it to happen. This belief in possession persisted into modern times, into at least the eighteenth century. It was in good part responsible for the witch craze that spread like a plague across Europe during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods, during which it was especially womenùleast hundreds of thousands of themùwho were the targets

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but as agitation, self-loathing, anomie (meaninglessness), and, ultimately, suicide. Insofar as these states arise out of malfunctions in the biochemistry of the synapses of the brain, attributing them to acts committed or omitted by either the sufferer or other persons in the suffererÆs life is often a form of ôblaming the victim.ö On the record, the parents, lovers, and spouses of manic depressives more often than not appear to have acted with almost superhuman compassion in attempting to deal with the illness. To blame them for causing the illness, when there is no clear evidence to show that they did so, is probably to misread the true situation. There is a good chance that, had they received antidepressant medication in time, such gifted women writers as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton would not have committed suicide, and would instead have gone on to write more, different, and perhaps even better work. However, it must also not be simply assumed that the causes of their depression were solely physical or that there were no circumstances in their lives over which they might reasonably be depressed. (A useful brief history of the major therapeutic modalities is given by Neaman 155-161.) The evidence that a
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Approximate Word count = 2733
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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