Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia with Nicholas Reid

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

In today's episode of the podcast, we speak with Professor Nicholas Reid, author of, Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia. After introducing us to how Mesopotamians viewed and treated mental health, Reid talks to us about the earliest historical records on imprisonment in the history of the world.  In his book, Reid discusses the evolution of the modern prison system as it relates to ancient Mesopotamia. Together we discuss the commonalities that can be seen between the ancient and modern systems and the benefits that come from learning about past cultures' successes and weaknesses. It may seem safely assumable to believe that because we are thousands of years removed from some ancient societies and their often barbaric methods of treating humanity, that we have automatically advanced into a superior, more humane society.   But with our reliance on solitary confinement and a loss of meaning, our system is missing what could be a more healing and transformative journey. By listening to this episode, you can earn 1 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today is kind of a unique episode. I wanted to dive into the history of psychiatry, the history of mental health. And I thought I would go back really far. And so I have today an expert, Dr. Nicholas Reed. He is an ancient text expert. He has a recent book he's written called prisons in ancient mesopotamia. And yeah, he studies Assyriology. And so do you want to define Assyriology and talk about a little bit about like how this is even studied?

Yeah, yeah, David, thanks for having me on for this podcast. Assyriology is actually a misnomer or the field was named incorrectly. When people began to discover these clay tablets with scratches on them or wedges on them, They begin to think, oh, this all must be Assyrian, so they called it this study of Assyria. We now know that certainly some of that came from Assyria, but we have Babylonian-Saharan text.

And so when you think of the field of Assyriology, it's the study of the languages and cultures of the ancient Near East. My specialization is particularly with southern Iraq in modern day terms. Okay. And so how does one study this? like what do the ancient texts look like or what are you utilizing to study it? Most of them are clay tablets that have been sun dried. They did use fuel for some of them and bake them, but that was typically more important tablets. The more everyday tablets were dried in the sun.

And they used a reed stylus to impress wedges into the clay tablets. And these clay tablets go back to 3,200. BC. So these are very, very old, and we have hundreds of thousands of them that are extant today. Part of the reason why we have this so much information is because if you bury a clay tablet in the desert, when you dig there, you find a clay tablet in the desert. If you burn someone's city, you bake their records. Whereas papyrus and other materials that were used for writing, they're not as durable. You have to have almost perfect conditions to have significant finds from antiquity. So like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which many of your listeners would probably be

aware of, you have to have really good conditions for that level of preservation, whereas Keneiform tablets are so much more durable. And also, it's cheap. You can find dirt anywhere. And so if you're making it out of dirt, then you can sort of write more, right? If it's not a, if the, the means through which you're writing is not expensive, then it's much easier. The more prominent ones are etched in stone or in various other precious material. Okay. Wow. Okay. So I think, I think we were talking about like why we're having this conversation now and why, like, I think a lot of people would be like, wait, prisons in ancient Mesopotamia. Like, what, what does that have to do with what we're going through now in our culture? How does that apply at all?

And so tell me a couple of the things that popped into your mind when we started talking. having this conversation. Yeah, well, I think it's interesting. Social history is a way in which, particularly with antiquity, where we can ask hard questions about what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be a just society, what do people need? And ask it in a political context. We're not sort of trying to begin with the inquiry into how do we change things immediately today right here and right now. That's an important question. But we're often sort of slowed down by so many other factors. Whereas if we can take a step back

and look at a different society, a different culture, so we can ask important questions for society today by looking at them. And I think that this is sort of the perspective that I try to approach my work with is some people want to romanticize the past and some people want to see the past. It's just backwards and ridiculous.

And I think what's interesting is to see the nuance, to see beauty and to see need for growth and change. And I think that's where the really interesting inquiry into ancient studies occurs is where we, when we look at it as life is complicated, just like it is today, and there's beauty and there's goodness. And then there are also things that need to change. And that was true for them, and that's true for us. And so that's part of the reason why I really got interested in the study of my original work with Mesopotamia was with slavery, and then with prisons as well more recently.

Okay, so maybe give us like the Sparks Note version on like what your findings have been, for example, with prison. And I think, you know, for those of you who might be curious, like, where this is going, I think we're going to talk about solitary confinement eventually. I found some articles that showed the impact of that on the brain and on mental health and physical health. And so we'll get there. But yeah, tell me what, what did you find with? specifically prisons and what we know about prisons back then.

Yeah, well, if I could take a step back briefly and just talk a little bit about, I guess, the sort of relationship between what I'm thinking about today or what we're thinking about today in your podcast. Herodotus was a 5th century BC historian who said the Babylonians, they didn't have any medicine. And everybody was just lying around on the streets asking for advice from passerbyes. That's simply not the case from what we know. There's a lot of information now with various diagnostic texts. And they had a, when they looked at things that were going wrong with the human body or the human mind, they would sort of try to diagnose that figure out what was going on, but they had a very supernatural perspective to it.

So there was a lot of magic and ritual and lament that was involved in that. And the way in which they viewed the world, from the lenses that we get through the text, is that every individual had a personal deity. And then that personal deity was sort of the buffer between or the protector between the greater gods. And this is really where it ties into imprisonment is because that relationship between their personal deity was important. And so there's a prison text to him to, the prison goddess, Noongol, that I talk about in my book. And it's, the, the prison is described as being full of hardships. It's a place where people are going about naked. They're weeping,

they're lamenting, they're, they can't recognize one another. They're, they're listening for serpents and scorpions. And they give cry in this lament. And the prison goddess does something interesting. What we would have expected before, what we would have expected from a history of prison's perspective is that only people who were found, who were being held with a charge, not those people who have been found guilty, we would only expect to see those who were charged, not those who were guilty in the prison in the text. What's fascinating is that they make up this river ordeal. They go through the process and the person who is found guilty actually has to return to the prison. And Nungal, the prison goddess, then after this lament and after this weeping, she's described as, through this lament, she's purifying them and refining them like silver.

She snatches them from the jaws of death, which indicates that there was probably a death penalty in view. And instead of receiving that punishment, the prisoner, through lament, through weeping, then is made right and purified and made right with their personal deity. and then that personal deity then praises Nungal in the process. And so there's some fascinating ideas that could be loosely connected. We wouldn't want to draw a one-to-one correlation, but that can be loosely connected to our idea of reform and correction in our modern society. Okay, so each person has a personal deity, and then that personal deity is, like, advocating for them with other deities.

bigger deities, right? And then in the prison system, it's almost like they found meaning in, like, this lament or this purification of getting right with your, getting right again with your personal deity, and then your personal deity praises the god of the prison. Is that? Yeah, that seems to be what's taken place. And this is a literary text. Like, this is a small vantage point. The text that we're talking about was copied quite frequently inscribable curriculum. many people attribute it to the late third millennium. It securely dates to about 17,800 BC in terms of the historical artifacts that we have. So if you think of you've got a text, that's what I can hold in my hands.

Or text is sort of what's written on that artifact. And if you think of an artifact, that's what I can hold in my hand. We have artifacts that at least date to about 1800 BC. And it could go back earlier. And so, yeah, it's not exactly like when we think of the positive benefits of playing music, for example, in prison, right? How there can be benefits to that. It's not that. It's a ritual that's taking place.

And that's part of what's fascinating. And the way in which you kind of get on the outs with your personal deity is through a variety of factors. It can be because of sorcery or magic. So, like, if when you weren't looking, if I spit in your coffee cup, and then that could cause you to become unclean, and then you could be abandoned, and then you're open to attack. I would never do that, of course, as he nervously grabs this cup and takes a sip. That's good. Other ways is that this could occur is through impious acts or deeds. So you do something that's, you know, quote-unquote sinful or wrong.

That would be another way. or you could simply become unclean or impure. There's some texts that talk about, you know, if you eat meat but you don't drink beer with it, then you have bad breath, and therefore you can't approach the gods until that bad breath goes away. And so you can think of it in terms of there's sort of more sinful ideas,

there's sorcery and magic, and then there is also this idea of etiquette. What's appropriate if you're going to approach a deity? Okay. So I guess that makes me curious. Like, what are people going to prison for? And who put them in prison for what? That's a great question, yeah.

So we have a number of texts that sort of answer these questions. We'll see people intersect with a prison for a variety of reasons. I think that the origins go back predominantly to labor. But we could talk more about that later. We have texts that talk about murder, theft, debt, sort of disrespect to parents, or an older brother, things like that. So the common sort of crimes. Now, the reason why we have those

are probably because people are being held until they receive a punishment, they're suspected of a crime, or they have to make a payment. We also see people being coerced to work in a number of contexts as well. So if you're being forced, there's an example of Lugol Ninagare,

who was a potter, and we were able to piece him together in three different attacks. and he's working as a potter. He appears then as a runaway and living in prison, or living under guard is the technical term in Samarian. And then he's back in the same group of potters working for the same administration later.

And so depending on the context in which one is living, one could also, in their socioeconomic status, they could also end up in prison in order to coerce labor. So prison acted as a way of getting free labor out of people? It was one of the ways of coercing labor. Or low cost labor. So you would, when it's in an administrative context and you're wanting to coerce labor, often we see rations being given to those individuals.

So they get a subsistence of sorts. When someone's being held because of a crime, suspected crime, they seem to be more dependent on their social network. they're complaining of starvation. They need someone to send clothes for them or some money to bribe a guard and stuff like that. So it seems that your treatment is directly related to the function or the reason why you're being held.

And I think that's what I was trying to do in my work is that we often think of the birth of the prison, to use the language of Foucault, is a modern phenomenon. And I think if you define imprisonment or prisons strictly by our modern political realities, then, okay, sure, that's true. But we have to recognize in our own society, prisons are multifunctional. They're used for a variety of reasons. And I think that's exactly what we see in Mesopotamia. There's a multifunctionality. It's a highly practical

and functional thing. If you can take someone and control where they go with their bodies, you can do that for a variety of reasons. Right. And what I was thinking about when I was reading that the poem in your book, which it amazed me that there was something so beautiful that was written. Like, it surprised me. Like, oh, this is very detailed. And it's 3,700 years old. And it's 37- Yeah. Yeah. That shocked me. And then what I was thinking about was like, okay, if you were trying to control labor and you wanted to create meaning, I mean, maybe this is just me and my lens as I read it, you know, you almost like, you want to create it to be meaningful, right? that they are going through this lament or this this purification process through their free labor,

through their forced labor in order to get right with God, right? And so the meaning that that gave to those prisoners, in my mind, it was like, it's helpful for the prisoner to have that meaning to attach it to. Otherwise, prison is just awful, you know, but if you have this like attached meaning of like, oh, this is a purification process and this is helpful. me. This is getting me right with God and right with the other gods. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting. I mean, I could, I think I'll just read a little bit just to kind of give your your listeners a little sense. This is from the hymn, Him to Nungal, mercy and compassion are mine.

I frighten no one. I keep an eye upon, it says the blackheaded people, which is just referring to the people living in the land. They're under my surveillance. And then skipping down, My house is built on compassion. I am a life-giving lady. Its shadow is like that of a cypress tree growing in a pure place. Skipping down a little bit more, when someone has been brought into the palace of the king and this man is accused of a capital offense, my chief prosecutor, Nendemgul stretches out his arm in accusation. He sentences that person to death, but he will not be killed. He snatches the man from the jaws of destruction and brings him into my house of life and keeps him under guard. And then, he sentences that person to death, but he will not be killed. He snatches the man from the jaws of destruction and brings him into my house of life and keeps him under guard. And then, goes on to talk about in line 106, when it is appeased the heart of his God for him, when it has polished him clean like silver of good quality, when it has made him shine for through the dust, when it has cleansed him of dirt, like silver of the best quality, he will be entrusted again to the propitious hands of his God. And so I think it's fascinating. And it does give meaning, but you know, thinking through like modern theory related to imprisonment, it also has a

a powerful coercive element to it. You know, if you think of like Foucault or even, even C.S. Lewis basically described, you know, he said, if you can, a robber baron would be tired from mistreating you once in a while. Just because he's just tired of it, right? Like, but if you can convince someone that they're doing something to you for their good, they'll never grow weary of it. And so this whole conception of it's going to have a positive, benefit to you can also be a really powerful coercive tool. So it can be beneficial in some

senses, but it can also be coercive. And it's interesting that Nungal features in socioeconomic tax or administrative documents. So we know that even though this is a literary text, and we're always cautious when thinking about history through literary texts. With this, she also appears as a net as part of the judicial process. And so you take oaths. So if you and I were in a dispute. And we were in Mesopotamia, and you were saying that I took something of yours. I was denying that we both would then be forced to go before and take oaths before the gods. And one of the ways this was done was this divine net that was associated with Nungal. And the reason why the net is an apt image is because it's going to catch you.

It's something that's inescapable. And so their Nungal also features in that, that the, so to speak, the king, or the long arm of the law, to use our more contemporary language, will find you out. And that's actually a concept that Foucault is really playing with in his book, The Birth of Prisons. Yeah, tell me, no one hearing this is going to know Foucault the birth of prisons. Oh, okay. So you're going to have to, like, tell us what he said and what was new about what he said, I guess. Well, he was just looking at, I mean, so probably the most important book on thinking about prisons, and he was looking at power, knowledge, and the body. And he was thinking through how punishment shifted from focusing on the body to the soul. And he was focusing on how

that had a controlling element for society. Now, Foucault provides, I think, some really great analytical tools for thinking about punishment and thinking about imprisonment, for example, in society. His puritization, I think, is pretty weak. He had a structuralist perspective, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of sort of gradation or overlap that existed, that he doesn't really pick up in his book. And so I think he's very valuable, but I wouldn't want to sort of buy into his periodization. And he doesn't use a lot of documentation for his arguments, because he was focusing more a literary style of a narrative style of presenting his work. But it's it when you think about when

you think about the history of prisons, I mean, that's the number one book people will, will turn to in terms of theory. Because it's just whether you love it, hate it or somewhere in between. Oh, it is significant in the field. And it impacted how prisons were done in the future? Well, I think it's just more thinking, I don't know that people are necessarily thinking back about how I don't know if it changed how prisons were done. Maybe it did through his critical thought. Maybe people did latch onto that. But I think in terms of when people,

when intellectuals think about imprisonment and the idea of correction and how punishment has changed in history, Foucault is one of the first stopping points. Yeah. Yeah. I think as I was like thinking about this and how we do prisons and solitary confinement

is one of those things that it just absolutely doesn't make sense to me, especially as I looked at the literature on long term, whether it's sarcopenia and physical issues, like increased headaches, to psychological issues, increased risk of psychosis, anxiety, depression, higher rates of PTSD. And it's very common.

Like it's still very, very common. Like there was one study where this guy talks about people who literally over the course of their prison term were in solitary confinement for 10 years. And the devastating impact that that had on them psychologically, that long-term devastation. Where did solitary confinement come in this process? Was it there in ancient Babylon? Was it there? Like, when did that start? Well, yeah.

So we never want to think about these things. in terms of a linear evolution of practice, there's a real disconnect between what happened historically then and what happens now. If you want to think about solitary confinement, there are a number of things one could point towards, but I'll just highlight one significant example. The establishment church in Great Britain was really,

so Anglicanism, was thinking through, you know, Protestants don't have a doctrine of purgatory. and Laurie Thornis brings out this idea of a Protestant purgatory, which is created through long sentencing. And so if you punish someone and you immediately kill them, then you're condemning their souls in sort of the idea, if there's no purgatory, there's no period in between. And so Thronus makes this, I think, compelling argument that part of the growth of giving people long prison sentences and giving them lots of time to reflect. and get right with God, came through the establishment church. And even this idea of, for some, it was meant to be benevolent, right? To help people sit and reflect and to think.

And what we know now, I think, is that can have very devastating effects on a person. We certainly see something, I think, somewhat related in Mesopotamia. Not a one-to-one, but just as we think through. how it works. So there are a number of terms that can be used for sort of mental health problems. So they might talk about,

so Demecura, or Demecuru, which is a Sumerian word borrowed into Acadian, it's for the mind changes. And that's how they talk about sort of what we would normally term something along the lines of insanity

or madness. And so the mind changes. The mind also falls. That's when you're depressed. They're psychosomatic symptoms that are observed in the literature. So like impotence, for example, a variety of things that they're thinking through and they're trying to sort of diagnose what's taking place. And the way that this is usually handled is it's interesting when thinking about the turning of the mind. They're very few solutions that are offered or cures, if you like, or treatments.

So it could involve taking some plants and eating it. You could hang some bones around a necklace. There could be sort of ingesting various things or rituals and stuff like that. And one of the reasons why we have all this terms, though, we think, or examples of this idea of the mind turning, but we don't have a lot of information on treatments is because it was viewed as coming from the gods. And so when someone had antisocial behavior or mind-turning or depression or even psychosomatic symptoms, this was largely dealt with in a sort of a magic or supernatural way. And through ritual. And that really ties into what we see with the hymn to Nungal. Because that's where the ritual process is how the problem of crime is being dealt with.

and the offenses that have been created. Yeah, I think it's interesting that there's a link between what was happening in Mesopotamia. It's like, this is a purification process. We're going to get you right with God to more of the Protestant influence on prisons. We're just like, we're going to get you right with God. We're going to have prolonged sentence so that you can get right with God. Very similar. And I, yeah, I think that one of my thoughts with psychopathy,

which is more of that sort of low affective empathy, I think I say you an episode on it, is that you really do need a structure outside of yourself to govern your behavior. Because if you are the only person who is the judge of yourself, then you will do whatever is in your best interest at all times. if you're psychopathic. But if you feel like there's some sort of eternal sense of, you know, consequences,

I think it does create a meta structure outside of you that then can create a pro-social psychopath. And so I don't know if you know this, but I actually worked for three and a half years. I'd volunteer on the weekends at a prison, a juvenile hall. When I was in medical school, I'd go in every Sunday, talk to a group of guys, I'd lead a group, And actually, I think that's, I don't know, that's kind of what I saw is that for some of the guys that I got to see over a course of, you know, a couple years even, having them change their mindset and have a more sort of, you know, cohesive view of what the purpose of life is or why they're on earth, you know, change them, you know, and it changed them for the better.

a lot of them were, you know, pulled into environments at a young age of gangs, of, you know, doing things to survive. But I think, I don't know, I'm kind of jumping all over the place here, but I think that what I'm hearing as a similarity, and maybe this was the part of the sort of, how do we help psychopaths be pro-social, right? Because, you know, 1% of the population,

has psychopathy. And if without that 1% you know, drifting into more of a pro-social realm, finding jobs where they're not harming other people in an ongoing way, but they can provide some benefit to society, I think is something that every culture has a challenge with. And it's hard to say that the psychotherapy that we offer is helpful at all.

And so I'm wondering if maybe there is something about this sort of idea of ritual, of a metaconstruct of like gods and supernatural that was helpful for them and still is helpful. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm sort of offering these criticisms and thoughts as a Protestant, you know. So, but I think that it's, I think it's always helpful to sort of understand where we've been helpful and where we've not been helpful. and where we sort of can grow and be critical of our own tradition. It's interesting when you think about, you know, you're talking about psychopathy. Samson and Lobb were these two sociologists who think a lot about the emergence of crime and life course theories. So what causes a person to commit crime? And it's interesting, I grew up in Mississippi and so grew up going, South Mississippi, so grew up going to New Orleans.

And I was in Mississippi, the eye of Hurricane Katrina went over my hometown. I was living farther up north than Jackson at the point, not far north, but the eye didn't go over Jackson. We were affected by Katrina. But you can remember sort of the devastation on New Orleans. And it was interesting that Katrina created this sociological experiment because so many people had to relocate. And what they found was is that the, and Malcolm Gladwell writes about this in, you know,

the New Yorker. It's a fascinating article about Katrina, but about how recidivism rates went down when people broke off and had to leave. So those who relocated, for example, to Houston and had to form new social structures, they dramatically reduced in recidivism, which is when you commit another crime after being, you know, incarcerated. And so those who stayed in the same community, in the same social network were more likely to commit crimes again. And so it was interesting that you had this natural disaster that sort of created this perfect sort of lens

for looking at, you know, what causes people to commit crimes. And so the positive benefits you're talking about from social structures to sort of the benefit of sort of viewing something beyond this life, all of those sort of things, a belief in God, those sort of things are fascinating when thinking about the emergence of crime, recidivism, and the like. Yeah, you know, intuitively, I don't know if I had any data to back it up at the time,

but I knew that if they, well, I think it was beyond intuitive because I just knew their stories, like if they would go back and be a part of the gang again. And so a lot of what I would talk to them about is like, okay, when you get out, how are you going to change your environment? Because maybe the only choice that you have is which people you hang out with. Like if you hang out with the same people that got you in here, are you going to end up back in here? They would all go, yeah.

I'd like, okay, how are you going to change your environment? And they would look at me with this, like, confused look. Like, I've never even thought about that. Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, it's the same thing for us as professionals. It's like, how do you get to the next level in your profession? It's like, well, you find mentors.

you find guides, you know, or how do you, you know, there's studies on like you become more like your friends over time. So it's like, how do you choose good friends? How do you choose life-giving friends? Okay, but coming back to the solitary confinement. If I could jump in, though, because it's interesting what you're talking about, like this social network. And that's one of the challenges, I think, with incarcerated, you know, or prisons is that you're putting people who are struggling with a variety of behaviors together in a single context. Right. And that's why I think it's so important for professionals like mental health professionals and counselors and educators to go into prisons is because where are you going to find those mentors? Right. If you're only surrounded by other

people who are struggling with the same sort of behaviors or challenges. So, you know, we're taking them out of a context, which is perhaps negative for many people. But we're also putting them into a context that could be equally or sometimes worse in terms of its impact socially. Or, you know, with the extreme of the solitary confinement, like then they have no, they have no inputs. Their environment is of deprivation. Yeah. And you know, and if we look at the brain of a kid raised with complete deprivation, it's like one third the size of a normal human brain. And that same processes is undergoing of atrophy and, and, um, of, of, damage, brain damage. There's actual studies that support this for solitary confinement.

And so, you know, we need human connections. We need good human connections. We need healthy human connections. What you're hinting at is that, you know, you put a bunch of criminals together and what do they get a master's degree in learning how to be a criminal, you know? because it's like if you just leave them to be around other people, it creates sort of a master's class in how to be a criminal, which may not be the best long-term thing. I like some of the authors you talk about, like, what is the alternative to solitary confinement?

It's like, yeah, there needs to be a ton more programs and positive ways of bringing them into healthy communities and groups. you know, how do we do that progressively? And also, you know, with, I don't know, I feel like there's such a loss of power when you're a prisoner that you don't really have a choice in choosing your environment, which is a part of the difficulty. And a lot of stripping of dignity as well. Absolutely. Yeah.

So you're so vulnerable. And that's the interesting thing, isn't it? I mean, like physically you're, in some sense, you're safer in solitary confinement. but mentally the devastation of that, right, is difficult as well. And then through the whole process, we tend to, yeah, we tend to dehumanize criminals. Actually, the label is meant to sort of take personhood, I think, in many ways, out of it. And help us just to see people as, oh, they're bad, rather than sort of seeing them as complex individuals that need help in many instances. Yeah, it's very dehumanizing.

It's, yeah, it's incredibly dehumanizing. You know, I watch a lot of, like, stories of ex-prisoners. Like, I've, like, somehow creeped onto that in my TikTok. So, you know, some of the interesting things that I've learned lately are, like, how clan-like a lot of the prisoners are because of the survival aspect. And it's like, you know, there's one statistic that's, you know, there's one statistic that's, It's like men get raped more than women, right? By other men. You know, women are not raping men.

Women are not raping men. And so, you know, where does men raping men happen? It happens in prisons. So you have to think about, like, that statistic. Like, there are a lot of rapes that are occurring in prison. So it's like, what do you do? You band together with a clan, so you protect yourself. And so there's a lot of, like, racial clan-oriented, you know, a grouping.

And the physical abuse that occurs in female prisons is largely guard on prisoner. So the rapes that occur, there's a lot of actual statistics on, so, you know, it's male on in prisoner on prisoner more in male prisons, but it's guard on females, prisoners in female prisons. So, and that's one of the challenges, too, is we're not even providing basic safety in either event. Like, you know, in either context, we're not providing basic safety for these individuals. Right. Which is, which then, it's hard to see how that then leads to correction. Right. It, it leads often to trauma. I've had a number of patients who have gotten out of prison.

And it's like, it takes a while for them to tell me about the rapes or what happened, you know. And this is, this is created psychological, this is, this is trauma. This is the definition of trauma, right? rape or something like that. And so, yeah, it takes away from that sort of ideal of the, you know, a good purification, a good lament that leads to, you know, something improving. It's the opposite, which is unfortunate. So, okay, so where, like, in your study of mental illness, you talked about how it's largely largely spiritual.

There are rituals. I looked at some of like things like Mandrake root or there's other types of substances which are psychoactive actually. You know, they have some maybe strong anticholinergic or delirium promoting aspects. Or, you know, is that something you thought about

like how they used things that did have a psychological impact? I don't think they were curative, but they would be a good placebo. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I published a text with a colleague where this guy's complaining about a toothache and a personal letter and asks for a bandage to be sent and for the doctor to wrap it. And they probably had some sort of, you know, salve or something like that that they would have put on it. So they probably were also using oils and things like that. It's not like they were just going around thinking everything was just magic.

So, you know, I think that that's the sort of the metastructure of what's going on. But they were also doing practical things as well that probably at least had some sort of a temporary effect, not necessarily, as you said, curing. And a lot of this, too, though, they seem to be, you know, apotropaic as well. So they're trying to... You're going to have to define that word. You try to prevent rather than sort of necessarily treat often as well. It depends.

Staving off the anxiety of future. or protecting yourself, you know, if you're thinking of it from that perspective. Okay. And a lot of what they're doing, too, in the diagnostics is some of it's preventive and then some of it's reactive. So if you sort of walked out your door and a sheep had turned over and died, then you're going to want to figure out what that means. Because they're viewing these as signs from the gods to indicate what's going to happen in life. And that's also part of the reason why they were such a true. great astronomers as well.

And really had an impact on Roman and Greco-Roman sort of astronomy as well. And they're trying to figure out and align cause and effect, right? These are sort of, these are aspects or movements in the physical world that sort of can be read by a professional and then be predictive of what's going to occur. And so you would want to have someone check out and come by possibly a diviner or something like that and figure out why that sheep passed away. But then also if you're getting an illness or your mind's turning, because they're going to have different ones. There's the, the one I mentioned earlier that's sort of a lower level sort of mind turning than there's like the frequent mind

turning that's sort of a higher level. But if you're going through that as well, they're going to want to figure out, is this because you've done something wrong? Is this because someone has done something to you through magic? And none of the texts we have are malevolent magic. Not telling you how to be, you know, sort of like do a spell on someone. It's all benevolent magic. But it has a malevolent angle to it in the sense that you do sort of use this magic to then cause it to go back on the person who did it to you. But none of the texts tell you how to be like a bad sorcerer or something like that. Interesting.

Yeah. So there's no secret, you know, witchcraft, black, black witchcraft books that you've come across? Not yet. Not yet. That's, and all you're reading? Yeah, okay. One thing that occurs to me is the power of placebo. And so, for example, they've even done this with like Parkinson's,

where they've measured that a placebo could increase dopamine in the brain. And, you know, Parkinson's is like dopamine depletion. So you give a fake med and you convince the patient that it's a real med. And it increases dopamine. or like there was another recent placebo paper that I went over in my social anxiety episode so there was a study where they gave 100% of the people eschatalopram and only 50% of them

were told that they were given the acetalopram for social anxiety the other 50% were told they were given a medication with side effects similar to acetalopram but not actually the medication and what they found was that the people that believed that they were given the act of medication had changes in their dopamine on the radio tracer in their brain and that they thought it was because they had like maybe increased dopamine and that also attributed to the positive effect of that belief so they actually did better they actually had lower social anxiety scores in the group that received the act of medication

but were told that they were not receiving the act of medication. So it's like belief, right? So when I read about like some of these things that were given as like part of the ritual, like they would actually cause you to be in an altered state. And then it's like it almost makes the ritual feel that much more real because of that altered state that it would evoke in you. Yeah. Yeah, ritual is so important.

And that's really interesting. That's what's fun for me about one of the interesting reasons why talking with you about this was was was intriguing to me is because you always see people coming at it from different angles and from their specialization yeah um so yeah that that's fascinating the other the other thing that um i've thought about like the history of psychiatry kind of like an overarching um sort of thing is it starts with often looking at the stars and like magic and attributing magic to things and looking at dreams trying to decipher in the midst of dreams, like how it can show something meaningful, right?

And then it goes to describing things that are more, so it goes kind of from the stars to the physical. And it often doesn't get to the psychological, like, for a while. because there's so many defenses against explaining things not spiritually, you know? So you have like, there is a psychological benefit of believing that something is purely spiritual when it's not, right? It's like, it's not me that has these bad thoughts. It's the gods, right? So the Greek gods embody all the taboos, and then us humans, we don't, right?

So if I do something or if I have a bad thought, it's not from my own brain. It's from like something spiritual externally in putting that bad thought into my brain. And so I see that as like the history of psychiatry of like there's this constant push away from wanting to think of the psychological origins in our self of maybe more our darker side or our shadow side or, you know. So I'm wondering if that, if that resonates. with kind of these texts on attributing to the gods. Yeah, I mean, it seems to be that the mind turning, for example, comes from the gods. Right. It doesn't seem to be something inherent in the person.

But that's like a, the mind turning is a beneficial change, right? So that? No, it's a negative. So that's, we associate that with insanity, mind turning. Oh, the mind turning. Yeah. So that's literally what the term means, the two terms. is mind and turn. Okay. And that's, that's sort of insane behavior or insanity is what we

understand it to be in our field. It's the same sort of mind turning is the same sort of idiom that's used in the Hebrew Bible in 1st Samuel 21 where David sort of makes the spittle come down on his beard and stuff like that. So it's a common Semitic metaphor, though the term that I was talking about earlier is borrowed from a Sumerian language. but that's sort of the that's the literal language of it yeah Spittle coming down on his beard

yeah so he was pretending like he was he was hiding from Saul and he goes to another kingdom and in order to not get killed he acts he feigns insanity and so he let Spittle come down on his beard and sort of and so they think that David's

lost his mind it's 1st Samuel 21 if I remember correctly but that's the same sort of language that's used there that's interesting I just did an episode on malingery and psychosis. And I didn't know David was the first, David was the first malinger of psychosis historically, right? That's cool.

Yeah, so it's like there's a progression. Okay, so let's bring it all together. Okay, so we talked about how solitary confinement is just this awful, horrible thing. There seems to be similarities in, in some of the ways in which there's this transformation that could occur in prison

that's like the ideal and sometimes does we know that people sort of get their lives together right they go through the system and they get their lives together and they come out better higher functioning individuals

who are able to move in society in a helpful way I just don't think that's the predominant experience I think what we're fighting again is is good, you know, good people fighting for a healthy prison environment, you know. And it's like there's so many forces that could make it less healthy. And so it's so hard to keep that environment.

So it is helpful and regenerative. Yeah. And I think when thinking about it in our own culture, you know, when people were, when people were thinking about the end of slavery, right? Ending slavery in the European and Western world. Some people's response was it was too big to fail, right? Sadly, it's tragic. They couldn't conceive of an economic, social situation that didn't involve it.

And I feel like that's some of the same response you get to imprisonment is when you start saying, hey, this is not doing what we hope it would do. Yeah. People can't conceive of a society without it. Like, well, then what? And, you know, then what? That's a big question, right? That's a huge question that many people struggle to answer.

Some people say abolish prisons. I don't know that that's the answer. But there are a whole host of ways that people go about it. But when thinking about, you know, professionals, right, the long-term goal might be political social change, right? But there are also other things that professionals can do. do individuals. So attorneys can give more time to give competent defense. Mental health professionals can devote their careers or a portion of their career to provide services to individuals who can afford that, whether as a preventive situation or someone who's already incarcerated. You know,

educators and, you know, go down the line. If people started using some of their abilities, their talents, their gifts, their specialization, we could, we could create, you know, You know, social change can be created in other ways, too, that don't have to necessarily, you know, or I could say in the meantime, right, until we figure out what is the best way to approach having a safe society. That's what we desire. But that also is built on a just system that actually helps people. Yeah. I think a lot of my, I know a lot of my listeners actually do work in prisons. And so. And that's great. Just the encouragement for those that choose that pathway, like you are making a small impact can sometimes make a large impact.

And yeah, it's like sometimes problems like this feel so huge that it's like, what can we really do? And sometimes just thinking about it in our own sphere. So maybe it's just for me making episodes like this. You know, it's like that's my, that's a small bit of change that I can do, put out the information out there, put it on more people's radar that, hey, there's this crazy thing that we still do to prisoners of putting them in solitary confinement for 60 days. It's like, how is that a good idea?

And just how it impacts them and increases their PTSD and their depression and anxiety and impacts their brain in a negative way, decreases their frontal lobe function, increases the amygdala fear responses to things. So, yeah, any final thoughts that you want to put out there? Any final sort of reflections or things that you feel like you wanted to mention, but we didn't quite get to? Well, I think just in final thoughts, I think that, you know, I would just encourage, or say what I find fascinating is asking these questions

and understanding that the past like today is complicated and sort of not viewing it in a romantic way but also not sort of looking down it as some sort of underdeveloped crazy society that we just have no relationship to I mean the very fact that there are 60 minutes on that clock in an hour and 60 seconds that's back to Mesopotamia the fact that when you think of a circle you think of 360 degrees that's Mesopotamia the foundations of astronomy

that's back to Mesopotamia, mathematics. Many of the influences there, they have playful nature with mathematics. So there's a lot of things that can be learned from ancient society. And then I think for me as well, I want to also think about our society today and ask how we can sort of grow

and critically engage the world around us and think about what does it mean to be human? What do it mean to be a just society? One of my final thoughts is when you talked about how in that ancient society, they used prisons to control labor. And I feel that still goes on today because, you know, you can get really, how do you get really cheap labor? Prison labor? Like, you get, and it's a huge industry. And when you have huge industries that are benefiting from that, you're going to have huge lobbies.

and when you have huge lobbies pushing for now more prisoners. So I think we have to be wise to see the motives and the bias and where the money goes and how the money creates a cyclic nature of pushing an agenda, a certain agenda. Yeah, well, and it certainly goes back to our modern example after the abolition of slavery. I mean, that was the one clause for criminals in the 13th Amendment, was that slavery was abolished except for criminals. And so that created a context

where people could create laws related to labor in order to coerce recently freed people in the South after the Civil War. And so that's very much with the Jim Crow laws and other sort of laws

that were developed after post-reconstruction very much tied to our practices today as well. Yeah, and I would, I mean, obviously there's an overrepresentation of minorities, black minorities in prison. There's also, from what I was reading, an overrepresentation of blacks and Hispanic people in solitary confinement. And that also needs our sort of attention.

Yeah. As like, this is, who defends these people? Like, who gives them a voice? There is no voice. And so hopefully this episode is a small voice, you know, that we can do. We as mental health professionals can raise our voices and consider this an issue. All right. We'll leave it there for today.

Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.