Internationale Zeitschrift für psychische Notfallgesundheit und menschliche Resilienz

Abstrakt

Explanatory models of mental illness and the mentally ill person

Stoops Erik

Throughout history, the nature of mental illness has been the topic of heated debate. Plato, who advocated a mentalist definition of mental illness, was the first person in ancient Greece to coin the term "mental health." According to Plato, "mental health" was thought of as reason aided by temper and prevailing over passion. Hippocrates, who took a more physicalist approach around the same time, defined various mental conditions as a variety of imbalances between various kinds of "humors." The phrase "mental illness is brain illness" was first used by Griesinger almost two centuries ago. This phrase has given a lot of momentum to the more recent medical definition of mental illness. In recent decades, significant advancements in genomics and brain imaging have contributed to the reification of mental disorders as brain illnesses and strengthened biological psychiatry more than ever