[1] Al-Balkhi is believed to have been the first to diagnose that mental illness can have psychological and physiological causes and he was the first to typify four types of emotional disorders: fear and anxiety; anger and aggression; sadness and depression; and obsessions.
Ahmad ibn Sahl, the ruler of Balkh and its surroundings, offered him both a writing and a ministerial position and al-Balkh accepted the former and declined the latter.
[5] According to Abu Muhammad al-Hassan ibn al-Waziri, one of his students, al-Balkhi's face was covered in scars that he acquired during an episode of smallpox.
He also wrote the medical and psychological work, Masalih al-Abdan wa al-Anfus (Sustenance for Body and Soul).
A modern scholar describes the bulk of his works as "more than 60 books and manuscripts, meticulously researching disciplines as varied in scope as geography, medicine, theology, politics, philosophy, poetry, literature, Arabic grammar, astrology, astronomy, mathematics, biography, ethics, sociology as well as others.
The geographers of this school also wrote extensively of the peoples, products, and customs of areas in the Muslim world, with little interest in the non-Muslim realms.
Al-Balkhi traced back his ideas on mental health to verses of the Qur'an and hadiths attributed to Muhammad, such as:[7] "In their hearts is a disease."
Al-Balkhi also introduced the concept of reciprocal inhibition (al-ilaj bi al-did), which was re-introduced over a thousand years later by Joseph Wolpe in 1969.
He recognized that the body and the soul can be healthy or sick, or "balanced or imbalanced", and that mental illness can have both psychological and/or physiological causes.
Al-Balkhi details the disorder as an extreme type of fear that results in the anxiety levels of a person spiking due to increasing the depth of blood in the body.
Rather than taking medicine or proceeding with blood letting, which were common methods to help an individual, he suggested gradual exposure to the object or situation that caused the fear.
[12] While the topic of sex is more widely discussed today, al-Balkhi explored the subject in detail, specifically various sexual attributes and the affects that they have on an individual.