Dementia Praecox
Dementia praecox (a "premature dementia" or "precocious madness") refers to a chronic, deteriorating psychotic disorder characterized by rapid cognitive disintegration, usually beginning in the late teens or early adulthood. It is a term first used in 1891 in this Latin form by Arnold Pick (1851–1924), a professor of psychiatry at the German branch of Charles University in Prague. His brief clinical report described the case of a person with a psychotic disorder resembling hebephrenia (see below). It was popularized by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) in 1893, 1896 and 1899 in his first detailed textbook descriptions of a condition that would eventually be reframed into a substantially different disease concept and relabeled as schizophrenia. Kraepelin, regarding the major psychoses as naturally occurring disease entities, reduced the complex psychiatric taxonomies of the nineteenth century by dividing them into two classes: manic depressive psychosis or dementia praecox. This division is commonly referred to as the Kraepelinian dichotomy and it has had a significant and fundamental impact on twentieth-century psychiatry, though has also been questioned.
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Some articles on dementia praecox:
... (1860) coined the term "dementia praecox" (demence precoce) for patients suffering from "stupor" (melancholia) ... psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin clinically defined "dementia praecox", later reformulated as Schizophrenia. 1899 The Kraepelinian dichotomy between affective psychosis and dementia praecox (schizophrenia) was introduced in the 6th edition of Emil Kraepelin's ...
... Emil Kraepelin was the first to draw a distinction between what he termed dementia praecox ("premature dementia") and other psychotic illnesses ... In 1911, dementia praecox was renamed schizophrenia by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who found Kraepelin's term to be misleading, as the disorder is not a form of dementia ...
... Meyer's paper "The Nature and Conception of Dementia Praecox," originally published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, was one of three papers collected in Dementia Praecox a ... the first book authored by Americans on dementia praecox, a mental disease/disorder/reaction that would also be referred to more commonly as schizophrenia by ... All three papers were originally read at a symposium on dementia praecox during the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association in 1910 ...
... of schizophrenia returned to the narrow range allowed by Kraepelin's dementia praecox concept ...