>>17757052 (OP)
OP, you're underestimating just how seriously premodern societies took "madness." The terminology wasn’t clinical, but the phenomena were observed, categorized, and acted upon. Ancient Greeks had 'melancholia,' 'mania,' and 'phrenitis.' Medieval Europe had a whole theology around possession, melancholy, and divine punishment. You might not have been diagnosed with "anxiety" in 1250, but if you wandered the streets muttering to yourself and refusing food, people absolutely noticed.
>as long as you did your job
This assumes mental illness can't impair functioning. In agrarian societies, someone with severe psychosis, catatonia, or what we'd now call schizophrenia wouldn't just keep plowing the field like normal. They were often marginalized, institutionalized (monasteries, poorhouses), or straight-up exiled.
>The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the "extrovert ideal"
That's a modernist reading that relies too much on 20th-century pop-psychology. Extroversion vs. introversion might be pathologized today in weird ways, but the Industrial Revolution didn’t invent the concept. If anything, industrialization institutionalized existing concerns: madhouses existed long before factories. What did change was the scale and bureaucratization of care (lunacy acts, asylums, state responsibility, etc.).
>and the pathologization of anyone who doesn't have that neurology
There’s truth here. Modern psych does sometimes confuse deviation from norms with illness. But conflating that with all historical recognition of mental disturbance is just flattening the past. There’s a difference between being a quiet loner and someone in a manic fugue state chasing angels through the woods.
tl;dr --> Yes, people cared. No, it wasn’t all just sin or deviance. Mental illness existed. It just wasn’t medicalized in our terms.
