psychiatria

Greek psychē meant breath, soul, and eventually the mind or seat of mental life. Greek iatreia was healing or medical treatment, from iatros (physician). The compound psychiatria — soul-healing — was coined in the early 19th century as medicine began to claim authority over mental illness. Before psychiatry, madness was the province of theology, philosophy, and moral management.

Johann Christian Reil, a German physician, coined Psychiaterie in 1808 as a term for the medical treatment of mental disorders. The word reflected the era's confidence that mental illness was a medical phenomenon, not a spiritual or moral failure, and that physicians rather than priests or jailers should treat it. The asylum movement of the 18th and 19th centuries had already begun removing the mentally ill from prisons and religious institutions.

The 19th century saw both progress and catastrophe in psychiatry. The moral treatment movement — championed by Philippe Pinel in France and William Tuke in England — emphasized humane treatment and removed chains from patients. But the asylum system quickly became a dumping ground for the unwanted as well as the genuinely ill, and treatments were often brutal by modern standards.

20th-century psychiatry oscillated between biological and psychological models. Freudian psychoanalysis (from the 1890s) emphasized psychological causes and treatment; the discovery of chlorpromazine in 1952 began the pharmacological era. Today psychiatry combines biological, psychological, and social approaches. The Greek soul-healing has become a medical specialty as contested and important as any other.