To truly understand the origin of how individuals became classified as “mentally ill,” one must look back in time and examine how the earliest explanations of psychopathology and mental illness were determined. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious symbolism was employed to explain any type of bizarre behavior that would now be referred to as mental illness. For example, schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder was then interpreted as an individual being possessed by the devil. Treatment consisted of torturing the affected person in an attempt to drive out the demon, and when this failed, execution was the next step. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the concept of mental illness shifted into a semi-medical model, founded on the notion that a “mad” person was controlled by an illness out of his or her control. Asylums were built where the suffering were isolated from the rest of society and torture was replaced with crude forms of medical treatment. Now, as the current century unfolds, the medical model continues to be the foundation of diagnosis and treatment of psychopathology, yet research indicates repeatedly that psychology exerts a powerful force on an individual’s emotions and behavioral state. This essay will illustrate how the medical model is not the most succinct way of conceptualizing and talking about maladaptive aberrations in thought, feeling, and behavior and that the metaphor of “mental illness” is not the most logical description of psychopathology. Rather, George L. Engel’s biopsychosocial model offers a more comprehensive description of the complex constellation of factors that culminate in what is labeled as psychopathology.
The “medical model,” in its emphasis on psychiatric classification as a combination of scientific and objective notions, relies heavily on the concept that biology drives behavior. This model assumes that psychological disorders are disease-based and that the onset and development of...