Mental Illness In Ancient Egypt

Treatment of mental illness goes back to ancient times, proven through trephined skulls that were found by archeologists. Back then most people believed that mental illness was spiritual, demonic possession, sorcery, the evil eye, or and angry deity, so their treatments were often brutal or mystical.
Trephining was a method used in the Bronze Age. In this method an ice pick like tool was hammered through the afflicted person’s skull to let out the evil spirits.
In ancient Mesopotamia, priest-doctors often used exorcisms, incantations, prayer, atonement, and other spiritual methods to drive out the evil spirit. Some means were used to appeal to the spirit through bribery, threats, punishment, and submission. Persians also attributed mental illness to demons, but they believed that good health could be achieved through adequate hygiene and purity of the mind and body. Egyptians were very advanced in their knowledge of the
However, magic and incantations were also used by the ancient Egyptians. Beliefs about mental illness and treatment were changed between the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE. Hippocrates denied the belief that mental illness was supernatural and instead proposed the idea that the amount of blood, phlegm, bile and black bile made up the personalities in an individual and an imbalance caused mental illness. The treatment consisted of purging, bloodletting and customized diets. Most of the time, however, mentally ill patients were considered a shame upon a family and were usually locked away and abused by the family.
The first mental asylum was created in 792 CE in Baghdad and soon after more asylums were established in Aleppo and Damascus. The first asylum in