Psychiatry
Authors: Wright Jessica 
Published: October 2024

Modern psychiatry is firmly rooted in antecedents from classical antiquity, from the ancient Greek concept of ‘therapeutics of the soul’ (an ancient parallel to modern ‘talk therapy’) to mythical exemplars such as Oedipus.This volume examines the modern question of what counts as mental illness, and how we should address it, through a historical lens that takes into account not only explanatory models, but also diagnostic and therapeutic approaches across the ages.

Taking the debate about whether mental illnesses are cultural constructs as a starting point, Jessica Wright teases apart associations with ancient medicine, philosophy and myth to demonstrate how these reflect internal contradictions and ambiguities within modern conceptions of mental illness and its treatment, including questions such as (when) is depression an emotion, a mood, or a mental illness? What kind of category is mental illness? Are mental illnesses universal or context-specific? The volume also explores a series of diagnoses and maps key connections between ancient and modern frameworks, as well as showing how ancient concepts of brain-based mental illness provide the foundations for the modern shift in focus to the brain and its subsequent implications for ethical and political concerns. What emerges vividly is how the process of exploring the connections between modern and ancient psychiatry, whether historical, constructed or imagined, can illuminate modern understandings of mental illness, its therapies, and its place in contemporary society and culture.

Psychiatry is a modern institution with ancient Greco-Roman roots. Some psychiatric concepts have been developed out of Greek disease categories, such as mania and melancholia; others have been constructed through imitation of and elaboration on ancient medical, philosophical, and even literary material (for example, hysteria and catharsis). Finally, some ancient ideas haunt psychiatry even after they have been formally discarded. This is clearest in the legacy of ‘phrenitis’, once categorised as insanity, but since removed from the medical lexicon; the association of phrenitis with preternatural strength and a hot/dry (i.e., masculine) temperament, together with its instrumentalisation outside of medical contexts as a tool for justifying coercive therapeutic interventions, recur in relation particularly to ‘excited delirium’, schizophrenia, and autism. Ongoing engagement with classical antiquity is not confined to psychiatric theories and also appears in arguments and positions critical of psychiatry. This reflects the function of ‘classics’ as a legitimating strategy that sometimes appears as parallel to scientific evidence: for example, the co-occurrence of certain concepts in ancient medicine and modern psychiatry is taken regularly as proof of their trans-historical and cross-cultural validity. Yet this apparent continuity or consonance is in fact an artefact of iterative borrowings, and the apparent parallelism between classical and scientific evidence relies on a longstanding (but false) attribution to the former of naturalness, timelessness, and universality. Unpacking not only the relationship between classical antiquity and modern psychiatry but also what stories are told about that relationship is a central project of this book.