The History Of Mental Health Researches

Our view on mental health and psychology has had major changes since the beginning of time. Around 6000 years B.C, when an individual showed signs of any kind of mental disorder, it was believed that the person was possed with evil spirits, making them think bad thoughts. The solution to this possession was to let out the evil spirits through drilling holes in the patients head.

This is called Trephining and was in use for quite some time before the Greek philosophers set the frame for psychology by analyzing human behaviour. An important man was the philosopher Hippocrates who came up with the idea that human emotions and behaviour are based on the excess and lack of different bodily fluids. These fluids were blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Female hysteria was often explained by the thought of a wandering uterus causing an imbalance in body and mind. This could be solved by helping or forcing a woman to ejaculate.

Then in 1885, a French neurologist named Jean-martin Charcot took an interest in further studying hysteria, mainly in women. He suggested that the hysteria his patients were suffering from was caused by their emotional response to a traumatic event in their past. Sigmund Freud studied Charcot’s research about hysteria and started with his own research regarding the psychological aspect of mental health and hysteria.

Here is where we start to recognise our modern psychology Sigmund Freud meant that unconscious conflict was the cause of stress and anxiety and that our behaviour is affected by inner forces and conflict. We as humans have little to no control over our behaviour and actions as it is determined from experiences of early childhood and basic animal drives. He also argued that mental health is not fixable by taking an outside action, like helping a female ejaculate. But rather curing patients by helping them to make their unconscious thoughts conscious.

This makes Freud fit into the psychoanalytic perspective as he was one of the first ones to think in this way. So your unconscious desires are your personality and to change that personality you will need to make your unconscious desires known. Sigmund Freud argued about the Oedipus complex. He suggested that young boys fall in love with their mothers and for the first years of their lives, see their fathers as “rivals” before they develop a fear of losing their penis and therefore repress their taboo thoughts and instead identify with their fathers. For girls, Freud argued that all girls experience “penis envy” and therefore dislikes their mothers for denying them one, and desires their fathers instead because he has a penis.

Whether this is true or not can be debated, but one cannot deny that Sigmund Freud has done a tremendous effort in the development of psychology. Freud's theories changed how we think of the human mind and behaviour, plus introduced a whole new perspective that is still in use today, namely the psychoanalytic perspective. Reactions against Freud's psychoanalytic view inspired the birth of a new direction of psychology. The behaviourist perspective