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This chapter discusses the nature of mental disorder as a historical phenomenon. Some authors, mainly academic psychiatrists, have attempted to get to grips with the diagnostic systems of psychiatry from the point of view of their historical development. For example, P. Pichot in 1994 has described the temporal development of psychiatric diagnoses, dating the birth of the modern diagnostic system to one hundred years ago with the work of Kraepelin. The problems which surround the debate about historical relativity versus continuity of psychiatric descriptive terms are variously grasped by different authors. In a series of papers G. E. Berrios from 1984 to 1985, displays great scholarship in his depiction of changes in psychiatric diagnoses and their associated psychopathological theorising. His survey of the whole field of change in psychopathological thinking in Europe over the past two centuries is brilliant, as is the scope of his detailed description of changes in the psychopathology of affectivity and his analysis of terminological changes in the description of obsessional disorder. The history of psychiatry has as yet shown only passing interest in the way in which past conceptions of mental disorder may have shaped both the experience of, as well as social responses to it. Perhaps part of the reason for this is the paucity of historical sources on the experience of mental disorder in past ages.