Did they used to be focused on things like the humors and stuff like that? Was hypochondria/germophobia not really a thing before germ theory? Are there any other disorders that have changed/presented differently due to new widespread knowledge about the world?
In: Biology
Your instinct that the things these psychological disorders attach themselves to are culturally informed. Another example you may be familiar with is that paranoid schizophrenics are stereotypically concerned that the government or some other evil organization is either reading their thoughts or beaming thoughts into their brain through antennas.
In the earliest broadly accepted fully documented case of schizophrenia, a man believed that nefarious actors had invented a loom which could weave air, and that the air was affecting his mind by affecting the magnetic fluid in his body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews
You may notice that this is obviously nonsense. It doesn’t make sense at all to talk about machines which can weave air to affect magnetic fluid. But if it isn’t obvious to you, I would like to also point out that experiments with pneumatics and magnetics and the development of powered looms were all recent phenomena in British society in the late 1700s. In other words, this man seized on the most plausible, newest technology, to explain why he felt that other people were messing with his body and mind.
By analogy, we can expect that people who are currently afraid of germs probably weren’t afraid of germs 500 years ago, because what they’re really afraid of is disorder and disease, and germ theory wasn’t something they had access to. So they would be scared of something else like miasmas and they would probably leave their windows open even when it’s freezing cold outside, or something like that.
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