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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