Dear H-Madness readers,

Chiara Thumiger has recently updated the entry on Mental Health in the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Her contribution offers a fresh perspective on how mental health was understood in the ancient world. Please find the abstract below, and follow this link to access the full article online.

“Mental health is among the most difficult topics in historical studies in that it brings together subjectivity, psychology, ethics, and the history of fundamental disciplines, such as medicine and philosophy, while participating in most, if not all, aspects of human life, both private and socially organised. The mental has a stake in all of these and cannot be understood in isolation from these connections. This entry covers the questions, pitfalls, and articulations of this territory, mentioning key passages and works where mental life, its disturbance or variation, and its health and fostering, are thematised, placing the discussion in the context of the history of scholarship on the ancient world”.