Understanding Madness, Mental Illness and Mental Health

Abstract

The concept of madness is evident in all human cultures and may be as old as mankind itself (Porter, 2002). However, the talk of mental illness and mental health is relatively recent. Every cultural tradition includes a concept of illness (McQueen, 1978), and often of health meaning freedom from illness, but what illness means and what health means vary across cultures. However, concern with illness is universal (White, 1982), and illness is usually dealt with by medical systems, systems of healing and so on. Nevertheless, the medical system in a cultural tradition may overlap in many ways with its religious system or other aspects of society; and the concepts of mind and of matters to do with ‘mental activity’ have generally become entangled with issues about health and illness. Notions around madness, illness/health and the mind that emerged in the post-Enlightenment culture of Europe in the seventeenth century spread from there to North America and other regions where European settlement occurred, finally crystallizing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a western tradition evident most forcibly in (western) psychiatry. And these ideas, and even the practice of psychiatry, have spread, although so far to a limited extent, in the non-western world too.