Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification

Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentative 1731 term, melancholia Scytharum. This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of ‘effeminacy of manners’ ( mollities animi such as observed in London’s Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality ( amour antiphysique/grec); of the mental masculinity of some women ( viragines, Amazones); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery ( anaphrodisia magica); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond.

Is mind–body dualism compatible with modern psychiatry?

SUMMARY Mind–body dualism is often considered to be incompatible with modern psychiatry for two reasons. First, it is claimed that dualism is falsified by recent advances in neuroscience. Second, dualism is thought to lead to an unhelpful attitude towards patients and their illnesses. I reflect on and challenge both lines of thought and argue that there is no inherent conflict between dualism and psychiatry.

Psychometric approach in psychiatry: excess or necessity?

Psychometric approach is historically associated with the formation of psychiatry as a science. Psychometric scales have been used repeatedly to form classifications of mental disorders. Currently, effectiveness of psychometric approach in psychiatry has received evidence-based confirmation in a number of international projects on the pharmacotherapy of depression. A new direction has emerged, called measurement-based care. It has been proven that the use of psychometric scales by 2545% increases the efficiency of diagnostic assessment in psychiatry, improves the interaction between doctor and patient, and improves the organization of psychiatric care. At the same time, a significant number of practicing psychiatrists do not use psychometric scales due to time costs, low validity and difficulties in interpretation. In this regard, modern psychiatry is in dire need of introduction of new psychometric technologies, allowing in a short time to develop economic, valid and accurate psychometric instruments.

ON EXTERNAL AND INNER GIFT OF SPEECH (LOQüELA) IN THE “SPIRITUAL DIARY”OF IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA

The present work aims at explaining the phenomenon of the gift of speech described by Ignatius Loyola in the “Spiritual Diary” from May 11 to May 24, 1544. It clarifies both the reasons for its appearance and the mechanisms of its work and typology, focusing attention on the problem of dividing the speech into internal and external ones, which was not considered before by the author of the “Spiritual Diary”. For this purpose, the study addresses the mechanisms of internal speech and the related phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations as a failure in the self-determination of consciousness in the work of internal speech, which in modern psychiatry can be considered as the norm in certain cultural contexts. Through the prism of this knowledge, the paper analyses the events preceding the writing of the Spiritual Diary, which happened to Loyola in La Storta Chapel, noting in these visions the combination of both visual and auditory acts of perception in the context of inner speech as a dialogue of consciousness with itself...