Welcome to our course on the history of mental illness. Before we engage this complex and intriguing history, we need to consider what is it that this history is about. What human experiences have been deemed to be ill and how have we named and classified these conditions. Let's start by examining contemporary terms, mental illness and mental disorders. Both names are used and used medical terminology of illness and disorder. They borrow from medicines, conception of pathology, the non normal or abnormal states that weren't medical attention to reduce control or cure. Hence came the word psycho pathology. Yet while medical illnesses like tuberculosis, diabetes and viruses, have material biomarkers that can be detected by blood essays, genetic tests and imaging technologies and the like. Most mental diseases cannot so be so definitively identified. The problem of determining the causes of mental distress is an age old problem. What has been easier to do as was done in early scientific and medical endeavors is to identify name and classify them. Over the centuries, people have identified and named individuals who experience on reason, non rational thoughts, emotional distress, voice hearing, delusions, visions or socially unacceptable behaviors. Persons who encounter challenges going about their everyday life and they also face stigmatization at different historical periods. These persons have been called mad, insane, lunatics and crazy and degenerate. Although these terms were long ago abandoned by mental health experts, they still live on in our everyday vocabulary and they still retain negative connotations. Imagine being called mad, insane or lunatic. These words immediately mean something to you. You are not being called normal, you're not rational or not reasonable. And this naming very often carries a mark of disgrace. It is a stigma that you must certainly and emphatically dislike. Being called one of these names as well as some of the current terms for mental disorders, bring stigma, a mark of disgrace in an act of being mothered as a person unfortunately deemed by some to be different from others. Our current terminology, mental illness and mental disorder emerged in the beginning of the 20th century. We will visit these developments in a moment, but first, let's take another viewpoint on how these people suffering with mental distress have been regarded. We'll use art. Art provides us with a window into the representations of persons deemed mentally non normal, lunacy, insanity, and madness, or whatever it was called at the time, drew the attention of many artists. Here we can view several art representations that were produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. First, flurries depiction of a famous Paris hospital for the insane, showing the enlightened moment when those suffering were actually finally unchained and treated with some human dignity. Next is a print of an asylum ball signaling the moral therapeutics that were introduced In the 19th century. It shows the then current approach of what's called moral therapy, that was premised on the belief that patients benefited from living in aesthetically pleasing environments and treated with compassion and dignity. Yet those individuals were not always depicted so positively, madness was also increasingly depicted up close. Illustrating it as a personal and serious affliction, Charles bells drawing titled Madness, is a good example. Another physician Charcot, used in new technology photography to portray patients. However, artists did not only represent madness is something that others suffered or is inherently repugnant. The lure to looking inward that marked the romanticism of the 19th century and the modernism of the early 20th century inspired some artists to query their own mental state. This inward gaze is evident in Gustave Courbet self portrait, entitled The Desperate Man and in shields, 1912-1914 self portraits. Some artists looked not at the desperate or at themselves, but instead suggested that the world itself was mad. Eduard Munch, famous painting the screen is understood to intimate this. Some artists look not at the desperate or at themselves, but instead it suggested the world itself is mad. Munch painting the scream is understood to show just this. Yeah, art representations give us glimpses into the culture in which those displaying mental distress lived. They show us changes in those cultures, from imprisonment to moral therapeutic environments. To illustrate how regard for the non normal was usually negative, but not always. As we saw some 20th century artists inward to question themselves and the assumedly normal self, occasionally, to intimate that we moderns are on that. In this class, we have seen how mental duress and our normal experiences have been recognized for centuries. Though, the names by which these experiences are called, and the representations of them in art and culture have changed dramatically, especially in the last 150 years. We considered to how identifying and classifying mental diseases or non normal experiences has proceeded without material evidence, such as biological evidence, that is used to classify medical conditions. The science of classifying is known as mythology. Finally, we noticed how cultural context has significantly influenced both the identification and the naming of non normal experiences. Our next class continues this history of naming the non normal.
