Abstract
The English term “early psychosis” was coined in the 1930s to refer to feelings of irritability, loss of concentration, hypochondriac ideas, moodiness, and lassitude that were seen to precede the onset of clear-cut hallucinations and delusions. The history of thinking about “early psychosis” under names such as “latent,” “masked,” “mild,” “simple” or “sluggish” schizophrenia before World War II and afterwards on the different sides of the Wall and the Iron Curtain reveals “early psychosis” as a mirror of quite aged international biologist controversies that are still alive today and to the same extent as they are misunderstood, are influential in their implications in today's psychiatry.
Highlights
The English term “early psychosis” was coined in the 1930s to refer to feelings of irritability, loss of concentration, hypochondriac ideas, moodiness, and lassitude that were seen to precede the onset of clear-cut hallucinations and delusions
What had been proposed at the beginning of the revisions, was the introduction of “psychosis risk syndrome” as a new diagnosis to describe a condition with a recent onset of modest, psychoticlike symptoms with clinically relevant distress that would indicate a significantly increased risk of conversion to schizophrenia
The English term “early psychosis” entered the stage of classical psychiatry in 1938, first of all with reference to “early diagnosis.”. This new interest in diagnosing schizophrenia early was revolutionary in a time that had thought of schizophrenia as a disease process that per definition would lead into premature dementia: dementia praecox
Summary
Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Campus Charité Mitte, Universitätsmedizin Charité, Berlin, Germany. Evidence for the neurobiological determination of the different stages of the changing experience in early schizophrenia would have been searched for by Conrad with biological means, just as he already had tried to find the genetics of epilepsy or schizoid constitution, if he had not died in the year of the construction of the wall before assuming the directory of the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich Huber, his lifelong co-worker Gisela Gross and sympathizing psychologists arrived at pinpointing “basic” symptoms even in “the failure state of latent schizophrenia” (Blankenburg, 1968), a denomination that might associate an anthropological psychodynamic account in Menninger’s tradition as “failure to adapt to personal life challenges.”. Under the strong promotion of the professional descendants of Huber and Gross, the DSM-5 has introduced “attenuated psychotic syndrome” as a research category, which may well be seen—just as the originally proposed “psychosis risk syndrome”—as standing in the tradition of “early psychosis” or “latent schizophrenia” that the article has recalled
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