Brief History of Psychiatry

The history of psychiatry and of interest in mental processes, as well as disordered thinking, affective states, and behavior, can be traced to the earliest phases of recorded history. Often, such evidence comes in the form of religious writings from around the world. For example, Clifford (Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry, second reprint, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2017) reviews the ancient Hindu and Buddhist underpinnings of Tibetan theories of mental illness etiology and treatments. Moses Maimonides published The Guide to the Perplexed in 1190 (revised and translated, 2024), which was primarily a religious treatise widely known in both the Jewish and Islamic world. His role as a physician, though, clearly influenced many aspects of the work, including discussions of both mental and physical processes. This chapter was originally written as a book (Stone, Healing the Mind: A history of psychiatry from antiquity to the present. WW Norton and Company, Inc., 1997), that was distilled into this much smaller work. The author focuses the content of this chapter, a minimally updated version of the one which appeared in the last edition of this textbook, primarily on history in the Western Hemisphere.