diagnosis:
Ideas of mental illness
in the 19th century

---

Over the years definitions of mental illness have changed, and different theories have been developed about its causes and treatments. Psychiatry (the study of mental health) first emerged in the 18th century, when it was realised that asylums were not just places of confinement, but could actually help to make patients better.

Psychiatry has always been torn between two visions of mental illness - one seeing biological causes for mental problems ; the other attributing symptoms to social problems or personal stresses. Some mental illness was known to be caused directly by physical disease, such as syphilis, where the syphilitic bacteria affected the central nervous system
and brain.

For much of the 19th century, the biological viewpoint was dominant. One of the first to attempt classification was the Edinburgh physician William Cullen, who introduced the term ‘neurosis’ in 1800. Influenced by this, the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel divided all mental illnesses into four categories - ‘mania, ‘melancholia’, ‘dementia’ and ‘idiocy’.

---