According to historical findings, psychological disorders are not just a modern issue. There are historical pages filled with accounts of prominent people who had suffered from such disorders.
For example, one description is in the Bible about King Saul's raging madness and terrors. The 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed marked paranoid symptoms in the latter part of his life, which plagued him with fears of secret enemies. Mozart was convinced that he was being poisoned during the period of his composing of Requiem.
Abraham Lincoln had suffered frequent bouts of depression throughout his life. At one occasion, he had been so depressed that he failed to show up at his wedding. Winston Churchill, too, periodically suffered from severe bouts of depression, which he referred to as his 'black dog'. The billionaire aviator Howard Hughes became so terrified of being infected by germs that he ended up a bedridden recluse in the last decade of his life.
Assumptions on Supernatural Forces
This sort of dysfunctional behaviour doesn't go unnoticed. Throughout history, human societies have explained and responded to abnormal behaviours in different ways, at different times, based on their values and assumptions on human life and behaviour. The belief of abnormal behaviour being caused by supernatural forces dates back to the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese.
For example, one ancient treatment based on the notion of bizarre behaviour being the reflection of an evil spirit's attempt to escape from a person's body. In order to release this spirit, a procedure called trephination was performed. This was carried out with the help of a sharp tool, which was used to chisel a hole in that person's skull. The hole was about 2 centimetres in diameter. It seems likely that in many cases, the administration of trephination ended the patient's life.
In Medieval Europe, the demonological model of abnormality believed that disturbed individuals were either possessed involuntarily by the devil or had voluntarily made a pact with dark forces. The killing of witches was justified in various 'diagnostic' tests and theological grounds. Examples of such tests include the binding of a woman's hands and feet throwing her into a lake or pond.
This was based on the notion that while impurities floated to the surface, a woman who would sink and drown could be posthumously declared pure. This meant that while the pure drowned, the others thought to be witches due to floating on top wouldn't be spared either. During the 16th and 17th centuries, more than a 100,000 people afflicted by psychological disorders were identified as witches, hunted down, and executed.
Biological Links
Centuries earlier, around 5th century B.C., famous Greek physician Hippocrates suggested that mental illnesses were just like physical diseases. In anticipation of the modern viewpoint, Hippocrates believed the site of mental illness to be the brain. By the time of the 1800s, Western medicine had returned to viewing mental disorders as biologically based and attempted to extend medical diagnoses to them. The biological emphasis was given impetus by the discovery of General Paresis, a disorder characterised in its advanced stages by mental deterioration and bizarre behaviour, resulting from massive brain deterioration caused by Syphilis. This was a breakthrough as the first demonstration of a psychological disorder being caused by a physical malady.
In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis ushered in psychological interpretations of disordered behaviour. Psychodynamic theories of abnormal behaviour were soon joined in by other models based on behavioural, cognitive, and humanistic conceptions. These various conceptions focused on different classes of causal factors and help in capturing the complex determinants of abnormal behaviour. The importance of cultural factors has received increased attention, too. Although, still, many questions remain, these perspectives have given us a deeper understanding of the way biological, psychological, and environmental factors can combine to cause psychological disorders.
Today, many psychologists find it useful to incorporate these factors into a more generalised framework. According to the Vulnerability-Stress Model, each of us has some degree of vulnerability, ranging from very low to very high, to developing a psychological disorder, faced with sufficient amount of stress. The vulnerability can have a biological basis, such as our genotype, over or underactivity of neurotransmitters in the brain, a hair-trigger autonomic nervous system, or hormonal factor. It may also be due to a personality factor, such as low self-esteem or extreme pessimism, or due to previous environmental factors such as poverty, severe trauma, or loss. Cultural factors, too, can create vulnerability to certain kinds of disorders (Ingram & Price).
However, vulnerability happens to be only part of the equation. In most instances, a predisposition creates a disorder only when a stressor, such as a recent event which requires a person to cope, combined with a vulnerability to trigger the disorder (Van Praag). Thus, a person with a genetic predisposition to depression, or who suffered a traumatic loss of a parent early in life, may be primed to develop a depressive disorder, if faced with a stressor or a loss later in life. In conclusion, biological, psychological, and environmental levels of analysis have all contributed to the Vulnerability-Stress Model, as well as to our understanding of behavioural disorders and their development.
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