Limited notes in an ancient Egyptian document known as the Ebers papyrus appear to describe disordered states of concentration and attention, and emotional distress in the heart or mind. Some of these have been interpreted as indicating what would later be termed hysteria and melancholy. Somatic treatments typically included applying bodily fluids while reciting magical spells. Hallucinogens may have been used as part of healing rituals. Religious temples may have been used as therapeutic retreats, possibly for the induction of receptive states to facilitate sleep and the interpreting of dreams.
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, mental and/or disorders:
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)