Did We Think Insane People Were All Possessed?
Hippocrates Disagreed.
Early Thoughts
He and his fellow Hippocratic physicians wrote that people who promised that their temple ritual would cure you of your illness were quacks. Of course, what that means is that for all we venerate Hippocrates, many of his contemporaries ignored him.
Though Celsus gave Hippocrates some credence, at least, because he recommended chaining the mentally ill in the 2nd century in his ‘On Medicine.’
Enough people agreed with Celsus and Hippocrates that it did get the notice of later writers. This is why St. Augustine admitted that it was possible that insanity could have a physical cause, such as a fever. He just wanted to emphasize that an evil spirit was also a possibility.
This was after Galen insisted, that since he hallucinated during a fever he had as a child, it was probable that insanity was generally caused by lesions in the brain or similar. He also acknowledged mood disorders. He recommended a glass of wine and a warm bath for anxiety, which isn’t the worst recommendation.
This was when mental illnesses got their classifications of ‘melancholia’ and ‘mania.’ Those were all the labels you got until the 1800's.
But Were There Exorcisms?
Yes. In fact, there was a town called Geel that specialized in performing exorcisms on folks with insanity from the 1500’s onward. Relatives sent the afflicted to the town and paid the clerics there to take care of them.
Note the timing: that’s late in the Middle Ages, around the same time that the Dutch physician Johan Weyer published ‘On the Devil’s Trick,’ which claimed that witches were crazy and not evil, though that isn’t to say he didn’t think their insanity wasn’t caused by some evil spirits.
These days, Geel is still an asylum, but they work with psychiatrists instead of exorcists.
Still, when Cervantes wrote about Don Quixote going insane, he blamed an imbalance of humors, and there was always an undercurrent of suspicion that a physical problem was at the base of a person’s mental illness.
Distinctions
Part of what makes the question complicated is that, while many people believed that you could be made to hallucinate by evil spirits or illness, those same people also believed that God could send you good visions. Margery Kempe made such a distinction in her biography, saying that she had hallucinations of fire-breathing demons after her first kid was born, but that after her mill and brewery had failed, Jesus sent a vision to her bedside. She had at least some clerical support there.
It’s not as though you can only believe illness was caused by one source, and plenty agreed with St. Augustine that an imbalance of humors and an evil spirit could be to blame.
Claiming one true source for mental illness wouldn’t be correct by our own standards anyway. Today, the latest research on schizophrenia suggests many causes. We just tend to leave out evil spirits, or name them something more…new agey.
Source:
‘Malady of The Mind’ Jeffrey A. Lieberman
‘A History of Anxiety’