Manic-depressive insanity
An 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.
Until then, states of excitement and states of dejection had been treated as separate diseases, each named for its most prominent symptom. Kraepelin looked at the course of the illness and joined them into one. The preface to the sixth edition of his textbook, in 1899, says that the chapters on dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity had been for the most part newly written[1]. The concept went on changing through the editions of the textbook from 1883 to 1926[2].
Kraepelin's division of the severe mental illnesses of unknown cause into two, dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity, according to their course, shaped the diagnostic categories used today[3].
Related terms
- Dementia praecoxA 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.
- 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.
Sources
- E. Kraepelin, “Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studirende und Aerzte, 6th ed., vol. 1,” Leipzig: J. A. Barth (1899).
- K. Trede, P. Salvatore, C. Baethge, A. Gerhard, C. Maggini, R. J. Baldessarini, “Manic-Depressive Illness: Evolution in Kraepelin's Textbook, 1883–1926,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 13(3), 155–178 (2005).
- K. S. Kendler, A. Jablensky, “Kraepelin's concept of psychiatric illness,” Psychological Medicine 41(6), 1119–1126 (2011).