Education about mental health should foster safe, respectful spaces where students can see psychological difficulties not as weakness or taboo but as a natural aspect of human experience shaped by biology, nurtured by culture, and sustained through resilience and community<\/p>\n
Indian Ayurvedic medicine also used humoral principles, together with diet, massage, and yoga, while Chinese traditions employed yin and yang to understand balance. Mesoamerican practices were much more drastic, involving skull perforation and psychotropic substances. However, they also highlighted the religious and communal aspects of healing, which are still relevant in today\u2019s discussions of mindfulness, meditation, and spiritual support.<\/p>\n
In Christian societies, mental illness was sometimes associated with demonic possession, leading to the use of exorcism. By contrast, medieval Islamic medicine combined scientific and spiritual practices, including baths, diet, cupping, and even theatre as forms of treatment.<\/p>\n
Asylums started opening up in the 19th century. Conditions were often inhumane, and treatments could be extreme, such as hydrotherapy, insulin shock therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy. Emil Kraepelin<\/a>\u2019s 1883 classification of mental disorders marked an important step toward systematic diagnosis. Yet stigma persisted.<\/p>\n A major turning point came in the 1950s with the work of Nigerian psychiatrist Thomas Adeoye Lambo<\/a>, who pioneered outpatient and community treatment models. This approach shifted the focus from confinement to rehabilitation, a philosophy later reinforced by organisations such as the Singapore Association for Mental Health (1968).<\/p>\n The devastation of war also shaped psychiatry, with trauma care and psychometric testing becoming central to post-war practice.<\/p>\n The emergence of psychological theories in the late 19th and 20th centuries broadened understandings of mental illness.<\/p>\n Sigmund Freud<\/a>\u2019s psychodynamic theory emphasised the unconscious mind, unresolved motives, and the interplay of id, ego, and superego. His successors \u2012 Carl Jung<\/a>, Alfred Adler<\/a>, Melanie Klein<\/a>, Anna Freud<\/a>, and Erik Erikson<\/a> \u2012 elaborated on this framework, highlighting developmental, relational, and symbolic aspects of psychological life.<\/p>\n In contrast, behaviourism, pioneered by Ivan Pavlov<\/a>, John Watson<\/a>, and B.F. Skinner<\/a>, rejected introspection and focused on observable behaviour and conditioning.<\/p>\n Later, the biopsychosocial model, developed by George Engel and John Romano<\/a> in the 1970s, was pivotal in recognising the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors. Its strength lies in acknowledging complexity; its limitation, as critics note, is that it often ignores cultural and spiritual dimensions that profoundly shape help-seeking behaviour and symptom expression.<\/p>\n The recovery model<\/a>, building on community psychiatry, has been equally influential. It is based on principles of hope, empowerment, and identity reconstruction, embodied in the CHIME framework (connectedness, hope, identity, meaning, empowerment). It reframes recovery as personal, directed by individuals themselves rather than imposed by institutions.<\/p>\n The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration<\/a> (SAMHSA)\u2019s four dimensions of recovery \u2013 health, home, purpose, and community \u2013 mirror this holistic approach.<\/p>\n Community psychology, particularly through Bronfenbrenner\u2019s ecological systems theory<\/a>, emphasises that individuals exist within interconnected systems: microsystems of family and peers, mesosystems of institutions such as schools and macrosystems of cultural and ideological contexts, and the chronosystem of historical time. This ecological framing is particularly relevant in multicultural classrooms where the meaning of words like \u201cdepressed\u201d can vary significantly depending on cultural background.<\/p>\n But perhaps the most transformative development has been the rise of neuroscience. From Edwin Smith\u2019s surgical papyrus<\/a> in ancient Egypt, to Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal<\/a>\u2019s discovery of neurons in the 1890s, to the establishment of neuroscience as a discipline in the 20th century, our understanding of the brain has expanded dramatically. Discoveries about neurotransmitters, synaptic plasticity, and brain imaging have revealed the biological underpinnings of mental illness, providing both diagnostic clarity and therapeutic innovation.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Josephine Ebejer Grech is a doctoral candidate specialising in the neuroscience, neuroplasticity, metacognition, well-being and academic resilience of post-secondary students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As both an A-level biology teacher and a doctoral student specialising in the well-being of post-secondary students, I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-288436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1208b5c68490f33eaf37fd6654c28f60c411b58e-1763246110-5b2de085-1920x1280.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n