Imagine you're living in a Tudor household sometime in the 1540s, and there's someone in your family who hasn't been sleeping.

They're not eating. They keep saying that God has turned his face away from them, that they're damned and that there's no point to anything.

And you're scared. You don't know what's happening to them. So what do you do?

Do you call a doctor, a priest? Do you just kind of wait and hope it passes?

Here's the thing that blew my mind when I started digging into this. You actually did have

options. There's a whole system for understanding what was happening to that person

and what to do about it. It wasn't our system. Some of it was wrong in ways that we can clearly

see now, but it existed and it was taken very seriously by very smart people, and it was very

much trying to help.

That is what we're going to talk about today.

How did the Tudor world understand mental health and mental suffering?

What did they think was happening when someone's mind seemed to turn against them?

And what did help actually look like? Let's dig in to the Tudor brain.

Hey friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I've been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009 with my show, which makes me the original Tudor history

podcaster. I am, as always, just delighted that you are here with me today. It is Mental Health

Awareness Month in May, and more recently, even since I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s, I think people

have become much more aware of mental health and are much more able to talk about it. And so I wanted

to do an episode on the tutors and how the tutors saw mental health. So let's get started.

But first, a quick word. If you are listening to this in May

of 2026, which is right now, I am running the completely free Anne Boleyn scavenger hunt right now,

15 days, 15 clues following Anne's story from her arrival at the English court all the way up to

May 19th, the anniversary of her execution. As I am recording

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