Mental health problems: journey from Baghdad to Europe

Abstract

This article looks at the evidence that not only did mental health problems affect people in the past, but that the physicians of past eras made numerous attempts to understand, classify and treat mental illness. Our aim is to show the strong scientific reasoning during the medieval era, in the Islamic world in particular, and how the complexities encountered by physicians centuries ago still haunt psychiatrists today. Akhlaq al-tabib, 1977, pp. 77-78)

Contributions of Muslim medieval scholars to psychology

“…Medieval philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age were scientific and practical, in contrast to early Greek philosophers who were mostly theoretical. They based their judgments both on observations made in the field and on information they had previously learned from translated early Greek and ancient Indian manuscripts (Abbasi & Omrani, 2013). Theoretical works from the early Greeks were examined and built upon by thinkers of the Islamic era, making psychology a more advanced and renowned field that was both practical and rational (Haque, 2004; Mohamed, 2008).…”