Historical origins of schizophrenia
Two early madmen and their illness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4990709 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Walter Heinrichs (0000-0003-4884-4854, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 349-363 |
| Publication date | 2003-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5061 • E-ISSN: 1520-6696 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/jhbs.10152 |
| PMID | 14601041 |
| OpenAlex | W2020515015 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 20 |
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness with a remarkably short recorded history. Unlike depression and mania, which are recognizable in ancient texts, schizophrenia-like disorder appeared rather suddenly in the psychiatric literature of the early nineteenth century. This could mean that the illness is a recent disease that was largely unknown in earlier times. But perhaps schizophrenia existed, embedded and disguised within more general concepts of madness and within the arcane languages and cultures of remote times. Both possibilities present major challenges to historical and psychiatric scholarship. These challenges are explored in this paper by presenting two "new" cases of schizophrenia, one from the eighteenth and one from the fourteenth century. The cases suggest that the illness may have existed as early as the medieval period. However, establishing the population prevalence of schizophrenia in earlier times-and therefore resolving the permanence-recency debate-may not be a feasible enterprise. (c) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Bipolar disorder · Cognition · Depression (economics · Disease · Mania · Mental health · Mental illness · Political science · Population · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Schizophrenia (object-oriented programming · Scholarship · Sociology · Demography · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Medicine Studies · Medicine · Neurology and Historical Studies · Psychology
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Schizophrenia as a permanent problem Some aspects of historical evidence in the recency (new disease) hypothesis
Some descriptions of schizophrenia-like illness in the German literature of the early nineteenth century
Evidence for the existence of schizophrenia in medieval Islamic society
The reporting of psychiatric symptoms in history
Whom Gods Destroy
The Madness of Epic
Whom Gods destroy
| Citations per year | 0.24 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2020 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |