History of Psychiatry
Name
Institution
Medical practitioners must heal the sick. According to Conrad and Schneider, the jurisdiction of the medical profession has expanded and encompasses many problems that were not formerly defined as “medical entities” (135). This expanded jurisdiction has led to the medicalization of deviance, which is defined as the change in designations from badness to sickness. In “The Medicalization of Deviance, written by Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider, it is argued that the medicalization of deviance changes the social response to such deviant behaviour to one which should be treated rather than punished. Take alcoholism, for example. Alcoholism was once defined as sin, moral weakness, and even crime. Now, alcoholism has been defined as an illness that should be treated. Conrad and Schneider also give an example of a woman being taken to a psychiatric hospital because she was caught riding a horse naked through the streets, or of a child being prescribed Ritalin due to disruptive behaviour in school. In each instance, a medical solution has been sought for each deviant behaviour,
The term psychiatrist literally refers to a “doctor of the soul.” Ministers of the church were among the first psychiatrists who focused on operating with the insane individuals (Gutting, 2005). They were the early professionals to assist crazy individuals in adjusting their behaviours. They precisely acknowledged insanity as conduct that required being corrected like any other sin such as adultery, habitual stealing, or selfishness. The source of institutional psychiatry was a parallel prison structure that served as a type of social and behaviour control (Foucault, 2013). The main weakness of the majority of the psychiatric historiographies resides in the failure of historians to accord adequate focus on the function of coercion in psychiatry and to understand that mad-doctoring did not account for the well-being of the patient nor did it have to do anything with healing (Dominick, 2016).
The majority of the treatments or cures were in the form of torture in order to ensure that the life of the insane individual is so miserable that they opted to adjust their conduct to conform to the social norms of that time. This can be supported by the debunking of the Hippocratic “humoral medicine” theory, which had wrongly stated that the cause of insanity was a disparity in the four touches of humour such as the melancholy blood (Micale et al., 1994). Bloodletting was widely exercised to rectify the gap. Moreover, ministers of the church perceived that living sinfully led to “melancholy blood,” which subsequently led to insanity. Following the revelation of the cell in 1858 AD, humorist was debunked and went extinct, and practitioners abruptly discovered that “bad blood” did not lead to insanity (Micale et al., 1994). Therefore, initially, mania could have been treated based on the wrong reasons for the wrong objective, which could have been manipulated by the then authorities. In modern times, the theory of “humoral imbalances in the blood,” causing insanity, has been substituted by a psychiatrist with “chemical disparities in the brain.” Nevertheless, there has not been scientific evidence indicating that chemical disparities of Serotonin occur in the brain of insane people, let alone that they lead to insanity (Dominick, 2016). Bloodletting “treated” insanity used by humoral doctors. On the other hand, shocks to the brain and drugs have been used by a chemical psychiatrist to “treat” mania. Actually, the only event when an artificial disparity can be recorded is when they are stimulated by neuroleptic medicine recommended by a psychiatrist (Dominick, 2016). Thus, in the near future, the whole exercise of chemical psychiatry could be debunked just as the humoral treatment.
This paper makes a scholarly argument concerning the history of psychiatry. It utilizes information and ideas from the various research studies to develop a historiographical discussion and then supporting the position of the researcher. The paper discusses the argument advocated by Michel Foucault, stating that historians discover that a large number of mental asylums were established during the 17th century because it was a “Great Confinement,” which was an attempt to manage different types of individuals amid the era of Absolutism. Additionally, Roy Porter provides a more reasonable opinion arguing that during the 17th century, the religious beliefs of Puritans established a form of the inner world (of feelings and thoughts) that resulted in modern anxiety. It also discusses the psychoanalytic theories of Freud.
Michel Foucault Argument
Foucault pursues the progress of the idea of insanity via three stages, mainly the Renaissance, the Classical Age, which is during the later 17th century and early 18th century, and the modern experience (Gutting, 2005). He states that during the Renaissance period, the insane were depicted via literature as portraying the comparison between what humans pretend to be and what they actually are and through art as having some wisdom which is knowledge beyond the restriction of the world. The Renaissance literature and art portrayed the insane as interactive with the rational as well as indicating the perplexing power of cosmic adversity (Dominick, 2016). However, the Renaissance was characterized by the commencement of an objective explanation of unreason and reason contrasted with the more comfortable medieval description from among the societies.
Foucault posits that during the launch of the era of the right (mid 17th century), the reasonable answer to the insane, who till that time had been assigned to the margins of the society, was to isolate them totally from the community by restricting them together with blasphemers, prostitutes, and vagrants, in the recently developed institutions in entire Europe – a procedure he referred to as “the Great Confinement” (Foucault, 2013).
He identifies various forces that influenced this confinement, such as the need to control unemployment, the wish for an extra-judicial technique to get rid of the unwanted, and wages (the workhouses’ cheap labour imposed downward force on the wages of free labour). Foucault contends that the conceptual difference between the reasonable and the insane was in the form of a product of this physical isolation into imprisonment (Foucault, 2013). Confinement enabled the medical doctors to have access to the insane who started to perceive insanity as a natural thing valuable to research and then as a disease that could be treated.
Concerning Foucault, the modern experience started during the late 18th century, with the establishment of areas solely allocated to the restriction of the insane under the management of medical doctors (Foucault, 2013). The new institutions were the result of a combination of two purposes: the traditional goal of incarcerating unwanted people to protect the society and the original meaning of treating the insane away from their relatives who could not acquire the needed care at home. These varying motives got lost, and the institutions later become to be perceived as the exclusive area where therapeutic care could be undertaken. Foucault sees the modern formal, more compassionate and enlightened care of the insane in medical institutions as directly controlling and cruel as their treatment during the 17th and 18th centuries; reasonable institutions had been.
The first time the mad were incarcerated in a privately owned building was around 1650 AD (Micale et al., 1994). The origin of psychiatry as a modern science should be perceived against the foundation of a faction that thoroughly adjusted the social aspect of 17th century Europe. The era of mercantilism, reason, and enlightened Absolutism co-occurred with a rigorous and new spatial inclination. It combines every type of unreason, which during the Middle Ages was a segment of a divine world and during the Renaissance a secularizing society and the civilized world of work, commerce, and morality, which is past the light of a reasonable world.
Foucault views that the escalation of mental asylums as a class war whereby the rich oppressed the poor. He assumes that power is everything, and the concept of discourse is self-defeating.
Mental disorder is like any other medical illness, and just like any other illness, mental disorder requires medical intervention. Mental illness has a biological origin like any other form of disease; thus, it should be treated in the eyes of the public just like the other illness. We should work on having social and professional conversations and get a proper place to collect all the necessary information, history and uniqueness of every patient when learning and treating mental disorders. Medical practitioners and social workers should openly present detailed explanations of mental illness as well as the positive side of it to the public.
Social therapies such as the family bond is a game-changer when it comes to treating people with mental disorders. Family is a source of social and economic support to anyone in a time of crisis. Family openly accepts the burden of caring for the mentally ill.
References
Dominick, L. (2016). Foucault, history, and madness. History of the Human Sciences.
Foucault, M. (2013). History of madness. Routledge.
Gutting, G. (2005). Foucault and the History of Madness. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2, 49-73.
Horney, K. (2013). New ways in psychoanalysis (Vol. 16). Routledge.
Micale, M. S., & Porter, R. (Eds.). (1994). Discovering the history of psychiatry. Oxford University Press, USA.
Porter, R. (1990). Foucault’s high confinement. History of the Human Sciences, 3(1), 47-54.
Porter, R. (1991). History of psychiatry in Britain. History of Psychiatry, 2(7), 271-279.
Porter, R. (2002). Madness: A brief history.