ABSTRACT
No single discipline can lay claim to ‘owning’ the paradigm that is mental health. Attempts to do so have provoked resistance and debate for centuries. Cicero (106–43 BCE) rejected Hippocrates’s earlier theories of imbalanced bodily fluids (‘humours’) to posit that low mood was related to emotions. Later, in the Middle Ages, monks displaced these ideas in favour of humour-rebalancing bloodletting, whilst using prayer and dogma to promote well-being. In fact, the way emotional distress is understood tends to evolve in line with the cultural ideas of the day. So as science became more influential in society, then a scientific understanding of mental ill health naturally followed.
