Lindsay France/University Photography

Michael Fontaine

For Michael Fontaine, Latin and the ancient world are alive and profoundly relevant today. To him, Latin is and should be a spoken language: At Cornell, he teaches classes in Latin, having learned to speak it years ago from a papal secretary.

Fontaine’s studies underscore that many of our current concerns are not new but are rediscoveries of themes from Rome and Greece. He has been tracing these parallels and antecedents in a field not often studied in classics departments: modern psychiatry.

“In the ancient world, there were three ways of looking at mental distress,” says Fontaine, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences. The oldest model, the religious or superstitious – illustrated in more recent times by the Salem witch trials – attributed strange and asocial behavior to supernatural forces, possession by demons or the actions of a divine being.

“Jesus himself was a firm believer in demons and regularly cast them out of people,” noted Fontaine in a paper titled “On Religious and Psychiatric Atheism: The Success of Epicurus, the Failure of Thomas Szasz” that he delivered in May at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

A second model was offered by various schools of philosophy. Problems that would today be characterized as mental illness were seen as social and ethical issues, says Fontaine: You could fix problems in your life once you accepted responsibility for them.

An immensely popular school of philosophy was the Epicurean school, which attributed spiritual anguish to the universal fear of death. The mental stresses and distress caused by this fear resulted from a person’s poor choices and failure to understand the relationship between his appetites and his responsibility, explains Fontaine. The cure, for the Epicureans, was exercise of mind and body – and talk therapy.

In the fifth century B.C., Hippocrates introduced the third, medical model, based on the belief that mental illness was a brain disease caused by an imbalance in the humors. Hippocratic healers sought to correct these imbalances, says Fontaine, through the use of psychotropic drugs like hellebore, forcibly administered if need be, and temporary confinement.

Today, says Fontaine, we attribute mental illness to alleged chemical imbalances in the body and seek to correct them with neuroleptic drugs like Zoloft and lithium. “It’s striking that the ancient medical view, which was decisively discarded in the 19th century, has quietly returned to dominate Western thought,” he says.

Fontaine traced this eerie resonance between past and present in a paper published last year in Current Psychology, “On Being Sane in an Insane Place – The Rosenhan Experiment in the Laboratory of Plautus.” He compared a comedy by T. Maccius Plautus, arguably Rome’s greatest playwright (c. 254-184 B.C.), to research done in the 1970s by David Rosenhan of Stanford University.

Plautus’ play is based on a Greek staged comedy written about 60 years after Hippocrates. “Menaechmi,” on which Shakespeare based his “Comedy of Errors,” is a story about identical twins separated at birth. When one twin unknowingly arrives in the city where the other lives, chaos ensues and the visiting twin escapes punishment by claiming to hear voices. A doctor then diagnoses the resident twin as the crazy one, interpreting every normal thing he says as proof.

In 1973 Rosenhan sent people with normal mental functioning – “pseudopatients” – to 12 mental hospitals, where they were committed after claiming to hear voices. They were subsequently diagnosed as insane despite their normal behavior. His study sent reverberations through the world of psychiatry.

Rosenhan’s conclusion, “it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals,” is an echo of Plautus’ character, says Fontaine, who cries, ‘Can it be that those who wrongly say I’m insane are really insane themselves?’

“The question at the heart of the play,” says Fontaine, “is whether insanity is a medical concern.” Plautus, it seems, did not think so.

Linda B. Glaser is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.