Societies’ Views on Mental Illness

Societies’ Views on Mental Illness Societies have been dealing with social issues throughout history. Whether it has been social class, civil rights, tradition, or religious conflict, societies have been trying to either over come the issues or change them all together. One social issue, in particular, that societies of been trying to deal with is people having some sort of mental illness. Historians, researchers, and psychiatrists, such as Karl Menninger, can date cases of mental illness in India from when “the Children of Israel were still in Egypt and the Greeks [were] three hundred years away from their Trojan exploit” and after a millennium, a case of witchcraft emerged in 1489 (16). Often times people see mental illness as something horrible or as some sort of embarrassment to have to encounter, but little do they know that sometimes it is society itself that causes some cases of mental illness. Societies need to learn the history of mental illness, how it has been treated throughout history, and how they should actually be treating people with mental illnesses. In ancient times, people had assumed that supernatural powers were part of anything and everything, and when it came to someone having a mental illness, people believed it was caused by “demons and spirits that had taken possession of the person’s mind and body” (Zimbardo, Johnson, and McCann, 533). It wasn’t until about 400 B.C.E. when humanity took its first step towards the scientific approach of classifying or treating mental illness with Hippocrates, a Greek physician (Zimbardo, Johnson, and McCann, 533). Hippocrates stated that mental illness is an “imbalance among the four body fluids called ‘humors’: blood, phlegm (mucus), black bile, and yellow bile” (Zimbardo, Johnson, and McCann, 533). His idea that mental illnesses had natural causes, not supernatural ones, was very simple, but incredibly revolutionary; for example, according to Hippocrates, people who had more black bile were more

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