On 10th May 2016 the Royal Society of Medicine hosted a one-day conference on Mind, Madness and Melancholia: Ideas and institutions in psychiatry from classical antiquity to the present . I attended the two morning sessions which focused on the concept of madness and melancholy in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and in the golden era of Arab medicine. The first speaker was Glenn Most (pictured below), professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale, Pisa, Italy. He started by challenging the view that there was a smooth transition from mythos to logos in the Greek thought, that is, that phenomena previously regarded as mysterious and supernatural were then explained by human reason. When it comes to mental phenomena concerning insanity, for a long time a multiplicity of methods and approaches co-existed. People who manifested strange behaviour could be 'treated' in phases: confined first, asked to try physical remedies second, conceived of as possessed by the gods and...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health