Research Proposal on Mental Illness

What always interested me was the idea of mental illness. How did people react to some of these illnesses in the past? Would they just lock up the crazy people who actually suffer from some mental illness? When did mental illness become acceptable to being openly talked about? How has the treatment of mental illness changed with time? I know some illnesses can bring shame to the person suffering from it and also the family dealing with it.

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I would love to research the history of mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. I think researching about how people treated these illnesses initially, and then how it progressed to modern day times would be quite interesting. Another thing to look into would be how the public perceives mental illness. Nowadays the public agrees that mental illnesses are real and you cannot just suck it up and get better. It was not always like that, so finding the point of change would be interesting.

To begin with, mental illness dates back as a far as 5000 B.C.E. whereby there are trephined skulls that can be associated with mental illness treatment which serves as evidence. Over the years, the attitude and perceptions of mental illness have changed over time whereby it started with a more negative; discrimination, ignorance and stigma perspective but have come to be embraced with a more positive perspective. The radical changes in the care and treatment of the mentally ill can be greatly attributed to the acquisition of new knowledge on the same which greatly contributed to the change in societal views. This knowledge is what I have come to realize to the development of psychiatric activities.

It is good to mention that mental illnesses were traditionally alluded to be as a result of supernatural phenomenon such as sourced from an angry deity, sorcery, demonic possession and what was commonly referred to as the evil eye. For this reasons, the resultant techniques used to treat it were hinged on religion such as exorcism, atonement, prayer, incantations, and other mystical rituals in a bid to drive out the evil spirits. Magico-religious rituals were also highly used by the priest-doctors whereby the priests carried out pathological mental rituals in a bid to mask the mental illness which was viewed as demonic possession. It seemed more interesting to me that since the illness was associated with demonic and spiritual punishments, the religious people believed that they would take precautions against the illness through hygienic precautions. For instance, the people believed that they would keep mental illness Abbey through the maintenance of pure minds and bodies which they would ensure through the keeping of good thoughts and deeds. These acts were normally practiced by the Persians.

Amidst all these ways of treating mental illness, there developed more disturbing modes of treatment. The most outstanding being the Trephining Method. In it, the victim was subjected to a torturous procedure that entailed drilling a hole, called trephine, in his/her skull. Notably, it was believed that the mental illness was as a result of an inhabitation of an evil spirit within the individuals psychopathology. Consequently, the inhabiting evil spirit was expected to come out through the drilled hole. Originally, there was the use of crude stone tools for the trephining procedures but with time, there were developments of other better tools such as the drills and the saws for the same procedures.

Further, into the sixteenth century, the Egyptians had developed a more open minded way of tackling and handling mental illness. For instance, they used more pathological treatments such as the exploitation of creative activities like art; dancing, painting or other concerts in a bid to lure the victim's mind back to normalcy. In some cases, also they had already established the advanced use of surgery, medicine and had a well-established knowledge of human pathology which means that they were able to associate mental illnesses with the mind of a person.

I noticed that all these ancient treatments were lingering on one thing; the supernatural source of mental illness. The illnesses were seen to be as a result of the persons trespasses and were thus expectantly treated through religious and other spiritual techniques. The Mesopotamians used trephining, the Egyptians used art and medicine, the Babylonias, Mediterranean-Near East and Assyrias all used therapeutic processes to trigger emotions, they cast spells, charms and also practiced other religious functions all in the mind of restoring mental health.

It was not until the 3rd and the 5th century that the Greek physicians, termed as the European thinkers, associated mental illness with brain pathology (Foerschner, 2016). This was associated with the body fluids such as blood, black bile, bile and phlegm. At this point, therefore, nutrition was used as a control measure and treatment against mental illness whereby the mentally ill were subjected to diluting and cooling diets that did not compose of red meat or wine. There were also surgical performances on the heads of the victims so as to drain the bad fluids within their brains.

Notably, with all these advancements in the treatment of mental illness, the illness was still perceived with a lot of stigma and discrimination. The mentally ill were greatly abhorred from society, what hit me had was the knowledge that there were beliefs that mental illness was contagious. This meant that those found with mental illness would be alienated from the society, especially from their families. In this case, some families would hide their ill members within the house. Even worse, they would neglect them and leave them on the streets for a life of vagrancy and beg. It is sad to realize that the social stigma still exists up to date in some countries such as China where there is a lot of consideration of family honor (Tsang, 2009). In such a case, the existence of mental illness in ones family would be associated with the being of a bad fate whereby the individuals would hardly get alliances such as marriages due to association with mental illness. In other words, the suitors would take the mental illness as contagious and would not associate with the relatives of the mentally ill person.

The ordeal was even worse in the European countries such as Greece. Here, the mentally ill family member would be disowned by the family since he/she was seen as a threat to the family line whereby the illness was taken to be hereditary. In this case, the ill member, depending on the severity, causing trouble, was driven into the streets, handed over to the police for incarceration or driven out of town. In other words, they were treated as outcasts. At times, they would even be subjected to some serious flogging simply because they caused trouble in the society. He beating was meant to drive them back to sanity.

Through to the 17th century, there was the establishment of mental hospitals and asylums in which the mentally ill were attended to. The families checked them into such places and would abandon them in these places. Most importantly, the asylums and the hospitals were mostly under the Catholics. This means that most of the places were religious and that the clergy was often responsible for these poor souls. The families that afforded these services would bring their mental victims and leave them there for a while or for life. Monasteries were used in Russia for the same purpose up until the mid-1800 when the asylums spread worldwide to such regions.

By this time, Christianity and other religions had spread well throughout places such as Europe. This also caused the belief that mental illness was caused by spiritual deficiencies to be widespread. As a result, the priests would advise their mental patients to repent and sort refuge from their God as they abandoned sin. This was the major means of treatment even in the established clergy-based facilities. The favorable characteristic of this religious era was that it was more humane as compared to the previous treatments of the people with a mental health condition.

Asylums (such as Saint Mary of Bethlehem in London, Europe) became more and more widespread beginning with Europe (Taylor, 2016). The major difference between the asylums and the church oriented care centers is that the asylums were characterized by much cruelty and brutality towards the mental victims. The asylums were a place of abandonment meant to relieve the ashamed families the burden of the ill member. Rather than try to cure the ill member, the asylum was like an imprisonment for the ill member. It was only full of torture and cruelty towards the sick and only served the purpose of segregating the member from the general society.

From the research I did, the asylums were even worse than the streets. Here, the mental victims were treated like animals (Taylor, 2016). The patients would be shackled and would be subjected to extreme dark conditions in cells and dungeons. The shackles were such that they would only move just enough to feed; hardly enough food of unchecked diet, but would not even let them lie down at night; they slept upright. The conditions were very unhygienic in which case; the cells were never cleaned up nor were the victims ever visited by relatives. The asylums were operational from the 1500s to the early 1900s in most places (Ramsey, 2011).

Reforms followed in the mid-late-1800s whereby the asylums such as the Philippe Pinel, Paris, were turned into humane facilities for the mental victims. The rationale was that the dawn of better conditions with no cruelty, filth, shackles, noise among other restraints, the ill victims would easily heal or recover from their mental illness. The conditions were thus completely changed where the rooms we well-lit and the patients treated as humans regardless of their conditions. The new motive was well-defined, rehabilitate the ill victim to a lesser ill mental condition with aspired moral and spiritual growth. Moral management was the major goal of the new era of mental illness treatment (Delany, 2012).

With time, the Biomedical sector developed and resulted in great advances and medical breakthrough which resulted in the development of a medicinal reliance. This resulted to the abolishment of the moral management paradigm to that of mental hygiene with the belief that medicine can heal the mental as well as the physical afflictions of the victims (Delany, 2012). This lead to the neglect of the social and psychological treatment of the victims. It was at this point that major mental hospital institutions were established in places like Canada and later in other regions of the world such as Europe (Ramsey, 2011). It took time for stable institutions to be established in African countries such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone.

In the late 1800s into the early 1900s, the Sigmund Freud (an Australian neurologist and psychiatrist) developed the psychoanalysis concept which led to the advances in the psychological concepts (Foerschner, 2016). Mesmerism, for instance, was the basic psychological technique that related the human body fluids with the magnetic nature of planets of which would be tapped to affect the fluid and heal ones condition. Factually, though, mesmerism was seen to have affected only hypnotic effects on the victims rather than cure them (Kennaway, 2011). The technique formed the basis of psychoanalytic practices which are still used nowadays.

Freud established the three divisions of the human mind: the id which functions unconsciously and is driven by aggression and sex; the ego that functions consciously and unconsciously which seeks to balance between societal needs and ones own desires; and the superego which...