Say I had something like schizophrenia around 1400 ad, I know how I would have been treated in Europe (thrown in the streets and forced to survive as a beggar). But how would I have been treated elsewhere, I.e. the Americas or Africa?
In Mesoamerica the patient would have likely been considered to suffer a problem of the spirit and be sent to a "conjurer", generally to be treated on traditional remedies like relaxation drugs and purification rituals, such as a temazcal (kind of like a sauna, but not really) as someone who was "out of balance" or was possesed by some external force, and at this point I want to be VERY specific, in that a conjurer was a very different thing from a medic or a surgeon, who practiced and had an entirelly different set of drug, plant and physical knowledge to draw from.
Alfredo Lopez Austin, in his book: Nahuatl Medicine Texts, makes an incredibly detailed sumation of diferent treatments and diseases from different sources.
But at this point I want to pause and ask, as at the time there wasnt a "psychological" school of medicine, I doubt I will find a 15th century author calling it specifically by that name, the closest thing seems to be Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon's Medical Spells section, which details "diseases of the spirit", and other stuff of the ilk, like disease recovery chance, birth safety and stuff like that, since I am not familiar with schizophrenia I would like to ask:
What kind of symptoms would a schizophrenic pantient would show?
Since a lot of sources are in fact spaniards who are recollecting the knowledge in America, it is useful to know how it was treated or called in Europe as it is likely these people would draw paralels to the European knowledge on these ailments.