different criteria. Four of them were: heresy, witchcraft, possession
and canonisation.
Treatments varied and were even more inhumane than some of the
treatments for madness is the 20th century. Those who would now get a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, schizoaffective, schizotypal personality
disorder, dissociative disorders and other psychotics disorders would be
usually persecuted. During the time of the Spanish Inquisition the
results of a diagnosis often meant death unless the experience or the
individual chose to agree with the paradigm of the Church.
Today things have changed a great deal. Persecution has been replaced by
simple discrimination. The outcast were confident to asylums,
medicalised then slowly rejoined society throughout the latter 20th
century. The days of treatments like the lobotomy and leucotomy where
parts of the brain were removed are over, though have resurfaced in
neurosurgery for mental disorder (also know as psychosurgery).
Thankfully these are still experimental treatments however once the
technqiues are perfected society and medicine has the opportunity to
'treat' in new ways from the Inquisition.
In the days of the Inquisition madness was understood not as illness but
as some sort of religious abheration. To the people of the day the
concept that it was an illness was absurd. It was likely punishment from
god or some error of god's way, rather than something with
biopsychosocial aetiology and Kraeplinian ostensivity
Taking a leap into the future, it is my hope that the treatments and
understanding of mental illness will have shifted again such that they
will look on their ancestors' deeds as we look upon the consequences of
diagnosis by the Inquisition. The leaps required away from the medical
dogma are as necessary as the heretic thought required to move away from
the religious model of mental disorder. Progress will happen in in no
other way.
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