Mental Illness

Mental Illness

Margie Allison

HCA/240

3/11/12

Lucretia Wright

Most people at some time in their life have experienced a blue day, feeling down in the dumps, or depressed. It is normal to feel that way occasionally. Circumstances may be financial, job related, family problems, or a death to deal with. These are all normal situations that can cause a person to feel down. When it becomes overwhelming for more than two weeks and they just can not get out of that funk, then professional medical intervention is required for help with depression.

In the history journals, depression was not recognized as a medical problem until just a few hundred years ago. King Saul who is in the Old Testament and written about in 1 Samuel 16 said that he was possessed by an evil spirit or some translations refer to it as God not letting an evil spirit in him. It was at the beginning of the Renaissance Era that mentally disturbed people were possessed by evil spirits too. It was a time that was horrible for anyone that was different because they were branded a witch and burned at the stake. Then in the later years it was thought to be from different colored bile’s, and after that it was thought to be souls that had divided.

Starting with the fifteen century they started believing that they were witches again and burned hundreds of thousands of women and children at the stake. There is speculation about how many of these people were mentally ill. The Greeks start building hospitals for the mentally ill but did little with them after that. It wasn’t until the eighteen and nineteenth centuries that change was initiated for these hospitals. They had become a dumping ground for society’s unwanted characters. They were displayed in public like animals in cages, and held in chains and unhealthy rat infested hospitals. Phillipe Pinel, in France, Chiarugi and Pisani in Italy, and Tuke in England brought reforms to these hospitals. They were not noted for...