ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages was a period of history ranging roughly from the sixth to the fifteenth century AD. The contributions of the era we will explore centered around the civilizations of Western Europe and the Middle East, which extended from North Africa through Northern Europe and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. Two religions, Christianity and Islam, dominated this era with their competing worldviews. These views greatly impacted the developing conceptualizations of mental health and illness in the West. Chapter 4 explores the transition from the Classical perspective through the medieval to the dawning of the Renaissance. It also looks at some of the views and practices developing in China and India at the time. Most of the rest of the world was dominated by more local, mythologically oriented ideas about mental illness and thus was not changing in fundamental approaches from the mythological era, although specific beliefs were different from place to place. The chapter emphasizes development in the Western world, and some may criticize that emphasis, but it has been the Western perspective on mental health that has dominated the professional landscape of the modern world, and thus it needs to be understood. The Western religious beliefs and cultural groupings and patterns that developed in the Middle Ages are the roots of our own. We are all at least partly bound by a sense of what is true about mental illness and health that is based on the religious and cultural beliefs we are born and raised with. This was particularly true in the Middle Ages. Such truths cannot be analyzed in an objective way, from an “outside” perspective, because they are self-fulfilling prophecies. To the extent that I believe them, they do create a sense of peace and happiness. As time passed, they came into increasing conflict with newer, often more empirically supported truths, thus creating a foundational psychological conflict in Westerners that is part of our psychological inheritance from this period of history.
