6 This view gave rise to mental hospitals and asylums to treat the mentally ill. 5 In ancient Greece the physician Hippocrates proposed a naturalistic explanation, and biologically based medicine returned to Europe from the Arab world during the Middle Ages. Over time, people came to see madness as a physical illness that interfered with rational thinking and not as a divine blessing or demonic curse. 3 When his parents intervened, possibly by trying to appoint a legal guardian to manage Francis’s finances, the local bishop ruled that Francis could have his freedom as an “ecclesiastical person” if he renounced his family and inheritance. But he also preached to birds and animals in a state we might today call psychotic, and suffered from what some scholars believe was mental illness. Francis is known for renouncing his family’s wealth and caring for lepers. This may have been how people viewed 13th-century Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, after whom San Francisco is named.

1 The idea that mental illness was in fact a way toward wisdom could still be found in medieval Christian visionaries. Many believed that madness revealed hidden intuitive and mystical knowledge. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils.

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