History of Schizophrenia
Fundamental difficulties in psychiatric nosology lie in the most basic fact that it deals with subjective states of the human mind. Modern instrumental diagnostic classification systems, which amount to lists of symptom inventories, could not provide accurate concepts of psychiatric disorders. This is also true for schizophrenia, a representative mental disorder. Kraepelin's dementia praecox was a collection of controversially proposed diseases, which had some critical similarities in their clinical features, i.e. the course and outcome. Despite initial debates on the adequacy of this concept, dementia praecox was recognized as a disease entity quite early, so that the concept of dementia praecox or schizophrenia proliferated, became diversified, and was then altered. We can now find large discrepancies between Kraepelin's dementia praecox and today's schizophrenia. However, the myth of disease entity was seldom challenged and psychiatrists today implicitly believe that they are dealing with what Kraepelin had proposed. In order to navigate this impasse, we thought that historical studies on the concept of dementia praecox and underlying taxonomic principles established by 19th century alienists including Kraepelin would shed some light. The aim of this article is to comprehensively review the history of concepts of dementia praecox or schizophrenia, and to question critically how much today's schizophrenia has received the conceptual inheritance from original concepts. Through this process, we expect to attain a renewed understanding of schizophrenia. J Korean Neuropsychiatr Assoc 2015;54(4):365 398