History of schizophrenia

rdf:langString History of schizophrenia

rdf:langString The word schizophrenia was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908, and was intended to describe the separation of function between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. He introduced the term on 24 April 1908 in a lecture given at a psychiatric conference in Berlin and in a publication that same year. Bleuler later expanded his new disease concept into a monograph in 1911, which was finally translated into English in 1950. According to some scholars, the disease has always existed only to be 'discovered' during the early 20th century. The plausibility of this claim depends upon the success of retrospectively diagnosing earlier cases of madness as 'schizophrenia'. According to others, 'schizophrenia' names a culturally determined clustering of mental symptoms. What is known for sure is that by the turn of the 20th century the old concept of insanity had become fragmented into 'diseases' (psychoses) such as paranoia, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity and epilepsy (Emil Kraepelin's classification). Dementia praecox was reconstituted as schizophrenia, paranoia was renamed as delusional disorder and manic-depressive insanity as bipolar disorder (epilepsy was transferred from psychiatry to neurology). The 'mental symptoms' included under the concept schizophrenia are real enough, affect people, and will always need understanding and treatment. However, whether the historical construct currently called 'schizophrenia' is required to achieve this therapeutic goal remains contentious.