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Need help with my writing homework on Asylums role in understanding of mental disorders. Write a 2250 word paper answering; In Ancient Greece tradition two quite opposite thoughts existed on a subject. From the one hand, “madness had become the condition and fate of minds divided against themselves” . Like in ancient plays, Greeks have seen something fatal and extraordinary in madness and associated madness with human’s soul suffering. About mental disorders were spoken “in terms of a heart or brain, blood, spirits and humors”. On the other hand, on a question what can be done for a mad person, there was a strict Hippocratic answer – a medical treatment. Madness was considered as a disease which was needed to be treated in a way all sicknesses were treated.

“The contrasting models of mental alienation developed by the Greeks – madness as moral perversion, madness as disease – were assimilated within Christendom”.. The treating process became a lot about religion. People with mental disorders were considered to be other God’s fools, or (more often) possessed by demons. For a religious group mediaeval Europe was madness considered to be demonstration of heretical thought, and people with mental disorders were treated like heretics. Even in 1621 when English author Robert Burton in this book Anatomy of Melancholy spoke about Satan to be responsible for mental disorders.

There’s a clue already in Burton’s book title which discovers doctors’ view on mental disorders. Doctors and scientists were looking for a madness to be revealed through a human body.