PSYC 1204 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: 1840 United States Census, Dorothea Dix, American Psychiatric Association
6 Apr 2016
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Lecture 1: the history of clinical psychology and mental disorder. Clinical psychology - the area of psychology devoted to understanding and treating mental disorder. In the middle ages, mental disorders was thought to arise from possession by evil spirits. Trepanning - when a hole is drilled into a person"s skull to release evil spirits. A common treatment for mental disorder was to perform exorcisms, which amounted to ritualized torture. Later, mental disorder became viewed as having a biological cause, like physical diseases. In the 1800"s, this led to the establishment of large psychiatric hospitals, or asylums such as. London"s bethlehem hospital or riverview psychiatric asylum in essondale, british columbia, which has been closed and abandoned, since 2012. Both did not like the terrible treatment of people with mental disabilities. Reformers shamed society into ensuring that residents in mental institutions were treated humanely and compassionately. By the 1950"s, public opinion shifted against institutionalization.
