page_title: Dementia praecox
section_title: Kraepelin's influence on the next century
hierarchical_section_title: Dementia praecox / Kraepelin's influence on the next century
caption_attribution_description: English: Emil Kraepelin Polski: Emil Kraepelin
context_page_description: Dementia praecox is a disused psychiatric diagnosis that originally designated a chronic, deteriorating psychotic disorder characterized by rapid cognitive disintegration, usually beginning in the late teens or early adulthood. Over the years, the term "dementia praecox" was gradually replaced by "schizophrenia", which remains in current diagnostic use.
  The term "dementia praecox" was first used in 1891 by Arnold Pick, a professor of psychiatry at Charles University in Prague. His brief clinical report described the case of a person with a psychotic disorder resembling hebephrenia. German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin popularised it in his first detailed textbook descriptions of a condition that eventually became a different disease concept and relabeled as schizophrenia. Kraepelin reduced the complex psychiatric taxonomies of the nineteenth century by dividing them into two classes: manic-depressive psychosis and dementia praecox. This division, commonly referred to as the Kraepelinian dichotomy, had a fundamental impact on twentieth-century psychiatry, though it has also been questioned.
context_section_description: In the 1899 (6th) edition of Psychiatrie, Kraepelin established a paradigm for psychiatry that would dominate the following century, sorting most of the recognized forms of insanity into two major categories: dementia praecox and manic-depressive illness. Dementia praecox was characterized by disordered intellectual functioning, whereas manic-depressive illness was principally a disorder of affect or mood; and the former featured constant deterioration, virtually no recoveries and a poor outcome, while the latter featured periods of exacerbation followed by periods of remission, and many complete recoveries. The class, dementia praecox, comprised the paranoid, catatonic and hebephrenic psychotic disorders, and these forms were found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until the fifth edition was released, in May 2013. These terms, however, are still found in general psychiatric nomenclature. The ICD-10 still uses "hebephrenic" to designate the third type.
caption: Emil Kraepelin c. 1920.
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