[Monastery asylum. A contribution to the ethno-psychiatry of Greece].

The history of the mentally ill in Greece, at least from the foundation of the Kingdom of Greece in 1832 until the incorporation of the Ionian Islands in 1864, is without either lunatic asylums or specialised psychiatrists. Instead, it is a history of the intermingling of two psychiatric concepts. On the one hand, the imported "professional psychiatry" supported by government and Western education physicians and, on the other hand, the indigenous (autochthon) "folk psychiatry" supported by the majority of the people and by the Orthodox church. The interaction of both systems resulted in the phenomenon of the Greek "monastery asylum". This paper, based on rich archival material, presents this little-known chapter of Greece psychiatry from the view-point of social history.