Dementia praecox

The term dementia praecox ( démence précoce ) goes back to the French psychiatrist Benedict Augustin Morel. In his 1860 published work Traité des Maladies Mental he described so that the illness of a young person who - previously completely unremarkable - increasingly withdrew and fell into a dementia- like state.

Emil Kraepelin recognized certain similarities between the described by Morel disorder and the diseases described by Kahlbaum and Hecker hebephrenia and catatonia: They started in adolescence or early adulthood and were associated with increasing mental deterioration, which ended in a state of dementia. Kraepelin was convinced disease process and output are best placed to delineate various psychiatric disorders from each other and therefore considered these three disorders as different manifestations of a disease entity, which he put together under the term dementia praecox (premature dementia). Across from her he put the manic depressive insanity ( as a precursor of bipolar affective disorder), which was characterized by an episodic and generally more favorable course.

However, this theory could not be stopped and the name was rejected as inadequate. The psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined in 1911 in his description of dementia praecox or group of schizophrenias for these symptoms the concept of schizophrenia and initiated a fundamental change in the understanding of this disorder.