Glossary / History of psychiatry
Schizophrenia
An 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.
On 24 April 1908, at a meeting of the German Psychiatric Association in Berlin, Bleuler objected to Kraepelin's name dementia praecox. The illness, he said, does not always end in a loss of mental powers and does not always begin early. He proposed a new name built from the Greek for "to split" and "mind"[1].
In a book published in 1911 Bleuler described not one disease but a group of them[2]. Nor did he think it was always incurable[1].
Its starting point was the dementia praecox that Kraepelin had put together in 1899[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.
- 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.
Sources
- P. Fusar-Poli, P. Politi, “Paul Eugen Bleuler and the Birth of Schizophrenia (1908),” American Journal of Psychiatry 165(11), 1407 (2008).
- A. Moskowitz, G. Heim, “Eugen Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (1911): A Centenary Appreciation and Reconsideration,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 37(3), 471–479 (2011).
- K. S. Kendler, “The Development of Kraepelin's Concept of Dementia Praecox: A Close Reading of Relevant Texts,” JAMA Psychiatry 77(11), 1181 (2020).