Discuss the History of How Mental Illness Has Been Treated

question 432

Essay

Discuss the history of how mental illness has been treated from the Stone Age, through the Middle Ages until Pinel's work in France, including the approaches used and which mental disorders that their "patients" were probably suffering from.

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Definitions:

Cognitive Therapies

A category of psychotherapeutic treatments that help patients understand the thoughts and feelings that influence behaviors, aiming to modify dysfunctional thinking patterns.

Conditioned Responses

Reactions that are learned through the process of conditioning, where an initially neutral stimulus becomes associated with a particular environmental cue.

Classical Conditioning

A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired: a response which is initially elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone.

Unconditioned Stimuli

Unconditioned stimuli are any stimuli that can naturally and automatically trigger a response without any learning process.