Some perceptions of mental disorder in pre-Petrine Russia.

Anyone seeking information on types of mental problems and their care in pre-Petrine Russia will encounter two obstacles: first, the paucity of sources (particularly from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries), and second, the undeveloped state of psychiatric medicine throughout the medieval world. Disagreements over the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness persist even today, of course. Nonetheless, surviving sources can tell us something about how the Russians perceived-and attempted to deal with-certain mental disorders in the centuries before Peter the Great. In this paper I shall consider several major groups or categories ofafflictions, including unynie (a term meaning "depression"' or "melancholy"), mental problems attributed to alcoholism (perceived both as a sin and an affliction of the mind), and various other types of irrational behaviour. It should be pointed out that Russians sometimes displayed a reluctance to recognize mental disorder where modern researchers would identify it (e.g., iurodstvo or "divine folly"); on the other hand, Russians occasionally saw "madness" where contemporary medicine might not (e.g. religious or political dissent). Since most of our early sources are clerical, one might suspect that demonology played an important role, but how important? Gregory Zilboorg has recently come under fire for contending that demonological theories of mental illness prevailed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In England, at least, surviving records show that the Crown took jurisdiction of "legal incompetency" cases; there, mental illness was generally attributed to "natural, even psychological" origins rather than to supernatural, demonic causes. i In Russia, however, the view seems indeed to have prevailed that madness was caused by the devil, demons, and unclean spirits.2 A corollary of this notion held that mental illness could be healed, with God's help, by saints and even ordinary monks and priests.3 So central was the devil's role that common terms for "mad" and "madness" (beshenyi, beshenstvo, besnovatyi, besnovanie) were coined from the word "devil" or "demon" (bes).4 To cure a violently-deranged person, the evil spirit had to be induced