Problems and methods of modern psychiatry

Abstract

The time is not far off when all psychic phenomena were explained only as manifestations of an immortal soul independent of the body. The time was not yet far off when mental illness was looked upon as the result of an evil spirit having taken possession of the patient's soul, and the treatment of mental illness was reduced to the expulsion of this evil spirit by prayers and incantations. The psychiatrists were then clergymen, and the places of treatment of mental illness were monasteries. Where treatment failed, there was only one way to get rid of the evil spirit - to burn, to destroy the body that became his home.

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