MENTAL HEALTH
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Abstract
This book, the product of two conferences on mental disorders organised by H. in 2010, begins with a stimulating introduction by the editor and continues thereafter with 21 essays on different aspects of the topic, from modern considerations of diagnosis and classification to ancient tragic, philosophical, medical and legal perspectives. H.’s excellent introduction sets out some of the ambitions of the volume, which attempts to speak to modern practitioners of mental healthcare as well as to historians of medicine and classicists; H. argues that a deep engagement with texts from antiquity will provide insight into the problem of defining, understanding and coping with mental illness both in the past and in the present day. He not only provides an overview of the papers, but also points to the further questions or challenges that arise in many of them. The first two papers, by B. Simon and J. Hughes, address issues of classification and diagnosis in modern psychiatry, further illustrating H.’s points about both the disjunctures and similarities between modern and ancient attempts to grapple with mental disorders: at the heart of much of the work lies the problem of defining what is ‘normal’, the significance of subjectivity and the idea that to contend with mental illness in humans is always to contend with the value systems of a particular society. These essays provide useful frameworks for the papers that follow, most of which concentrate on Greek literature, with emphasis on the Hippocratic Corpus, Plato, Aristotle and Galen. The second section, ‘Greek Classifications’, begins with C. Thumiger’s paper on the early Greek vocabulary of insanity, which will be essential reading for those interested in the nuances of a host of words found not just in early medical texts but also in contemporary literature. J. Jouanna, V. Nutton, V. Boudon-Millot and B. Holmes deftly address the efforts of various ancient medical writers to classify different mental illnesses and to explain the physiology of madness. Jounna argues for a stable binary understanding of insanity, one depressive and the other hyperactive, that he traces from the Hippocratic medical authors into Galenic times; Nutton discusses Galen’s focus on the connections between mental illnesses and other diseases of the body, his ‘psychosomatism’, underscoring Galen’s constant interest in treating his whole patient; Boudon-Millot also looks at Galen, examining his broad approach to mental diseases, which for him encompass not only the extremes of mania but also human passions; Holmes explores how Galen integrates his medical and philosophical ideas of body and soul in her discussion of Galenic sympathy, arguing that Galen departs from his philosophical predecessors by THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 45