Targeting the stigma of psychiatry and psychiatrists

Abstract

The phenomenon of a group of people or communities (across the different cultures) treating an individual who has a mental health problem as ‘the other’ can be traced as far back as antiquity. Superstition held that these people were deemed to have consorted with the occult in some way or another and as such were possessed by a malevolent entity. The only ‘treatment’, therefore, was to exorcise or expunge the nefarious spirit by consulting some necromancer who would invariably, among other things, whisper incantations, trephine holes in skulls and resort to other forms of witchcraft and quackery.