Role Of Mental Illness Research Articles

The role of mental illness in the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: An assessment

Historians of psychiatry have propagated the view that the witch hunts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe were primarily a persecution of the mentally ill and that demonological concepts of possession and witchcraft impeded psychiatric progress for centuries. The author reviews the evidence marshaled by these historians and examines additional historical material bearing on the psychopathological view. He concludes that the role of mental disorder in the witch hunts has been overinflated by authors with an interest in promulgating the medical model of abnormal behavior. Furthermore, the psychopathological paradigm is based on an outmoded philosophy of science, which results in historical distortion and paradoxes, and on restriction and selectivity in the choice of evidence.

The history of witchcraft: a review with some psychiatric comments.

Witchcraft, held to be an anti-Christian heresy with evil supernatural powers, is distinguished from common superstition and reviewed. The author suggests individual and group psychodynamics to explain the delusion, its inclusion of perverse sexuality, and its treatment by sadistic aggression. Opponents of the delusion are mentioned, and the role of mental illness among both the persecutors and the persecuted is defined.

Body fluid indoles of normal and mentally-ill subjects. I. Preliminary survey of the occurrence of some urinary indoles.

A role in mental illness for an aberrant metabolism of indole compounds was first advanced some sixty years ago, when their alleged toxicity to the nervous system figured prominently in the then current theory of auto-intoxication by bacterial action in the bowel (Herter, 1898, 1907). Although in a modified form it continues to receive the support of Buscaino (1958), auto-intoxication of this nature is now generally rejected as a factor in mental illness (see particularly Alvarez, 1924) and the renewed interest in indoles and brain function of recent years has come from a different standpoint. Thus, study of the central nervous system effects of indoles such as 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin) and bufotenin, and of compounds containing an indole group such as lysergic acid and reserpine, has inspired several new theories concerning normal and abnormal roles for indoles in the brain (Woolley and Shaw, 1957; Brodie and Shore, 1957; Hoffer, 1957).

Does the public health laboratory have a role in mental illness.

Does the Public Health Laboratory Have a Role in Mental Illness? Leon Buchbinder, and Alphonza R. Ferguson CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.48.4.473 Published Online: August 29, 2011