Dementia praecox
A diagnosis put together by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in his 1899 textbook. The name means an early loss of mental powers: an illness that starts young and wears the mind down. It was later renamed schizophrenia.
Kraepelin sorted mental illnesses not by the most prominent symptom of the moment but by how an illness runs and how it ends. Dementia praecox brought together three forms that had been described separately (hebephrenic, catatonic and paranoid), on the ground that they share underlying symptoms and a course[1]. It appeared, alongside manic-depressive insanity, in the sixth edition of his textbook in 1899[2].
Its cause was unknown. Kraepelin hoped for a classification that followed nature, but he thought the knowledge of causes it required would not be available in his lifetime[3].
In 1908 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler argued that the illness does not always begin early and does not always end in a loss of mental powers, and proposed the new name schizophrenia[4].
Related terms
- Manic-depressive insanityAn illness in which periods of elevated mood and overactivity alternate with periods of depression. Kraepelin put it together in 1899, set apart from dementia praecox.
- SchizophreniaAn illness in which the connections between mental functions such as thought and feeling break down. The word was coined in 1908 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler.
- General paresisA disease caused by the syphilis organism entering the brain. Mental symptoms such as memory loss and delusions advance together with bodily ones such as slurred speech and tremor.
Sources
- K. S. Kendler, “The Development of Kraepelin's Concept of Dementia Praecox: A Close Reading of Relevant Texts,” JAMA Psychiatry 77(11), 1181 (2020).
- E. Kraepelin, “Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studirende und Aerzte, 6th ed., vol. 1,” Leipzig: J. A. Barth (1899).
- K. S. Kendler, A. Jablensky, “Kraepelin's concept of psychiatric illness,” Psychological Medicine 41(6), 1119–1126 (2011).
- P. Fusar-Poli, P. Politi, “Paul Eugen Bleuler and the Birth of Schizophrenia (1908),” American Journal of Psychiatry 165(11), 1407 (2008).