How did cultures approach mental health and well-being before the advent of modern psychology? Was it treated as a separate discipline, or incorporated into a more holistic treatment with the rest of the body (like Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine)?

by Dropout_Kitchen

Hey all,

Did a search and couldn't find a lot on this topic, so I thought I'd try asking in this thread.

As far as I know, psychology in the West really started to be born as a science after Sigmund Freud began to analyze patients, diagnose symptoms, and prescribe methods of working through issues.

Obviously since then psychology has grown away from psychoanalysis into a more developed science involving cognitive science and neuro-chemistry. But what was it like before that? In the Middle Ages people believed in an imbalance of humors affecting a person. The Romans identified melancholia as a distinct disease with physical side-effects. Chinese medicine focuses on a restoration of balance of yin and yang, which I imagine extends to mental function and feeling as well.

Can someone describe what some cultures did in order to remedy issues like depression, mania, or schizophrenia and how they were viewed? I think it'd be interesting reading.

Thanks!

MisterFiftyFifty

Honestly, while there were holistic and spiritual treatments (and even pseudo-scientific ones, i.e. take this and hope it works) for psychological problems, they were not well understood at all for a very long time. Most of the time, you would be called "mad" if your symptoms were bad enough, perhaps just a bit off your rocker if they weren't serious. In other cases, you might be accused of being possessed and the like, which would rarely end well.

In the end, you'd probably be locked up since there was no treatment for madness, or so they called it. Holistic treatments like you mentioned rarely worked for seriously mentally ill people.