Hey, welcome to the Therapy Thoughts podcast. This is Tiffany Rowe. I'm a licensed clinical mental health

counselor and psychology teacher. I own mindful counseling in ORM, Utah, and I'm on a mission to

break down mental health stigma. Therapy Thoughts is a podcast all about helping you love yourself

and make peace with your mind, body, and food. I'll share some education, tips, interviews, and tools from my

clinical experience so you can improve your mental health. Stay tuned as we change the mental

health game and talk all about therapy.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 19 of Therapy Thoughts, the podcast. This is Tiffany Roe.

And today I'm going to put on my psychology teacher cap. And we're going to go down the history and talk all about the historical explanations of stigma and mental

illness. So really, you could look at this podcast episode like an abnormal psychology lecture.

What's the history of mental illness? And how does that impact stigma today? I want to start

with the early perspectives. If you look at ancient explanations of abnormal

behavior and mental illness, it starts off with a very interesting explanation. Now, before I

jump into this, let me remind you that when I use the term abnormal, I don't mean that in a

stigmatizing way, but it can absolutely be

taken or used as a stigmatizing concept. But in the psychology field, we try to measure and

categorize and use a dimensional perspective to understand behavior that causes harm to people

and causes suffering. So when I say the word abnormal,

what I mean is, you know, we could statistically measure this out that most people will not

have this experience. Another way to measure abnormality is the amount of distress it causes,

the amount of impairment in your life that it causes. And so we're talking

about abnormal behavior, abnormal psychology, mental illness, mental health struggles. And that's

kind of what I'm speaking to. So early on ancient perspectives, we would see folks attribute abnormal

...