Oskar Panizza: Psychiatrist, antipsychiatrist, patient The man behind Emil Kraepelin's case report on 'paraphrenias'

Abstract

A contemporary of Emil Kraepelin, Oskar Panizza was a psychiatric trainee under Bernhard von Gudden at the Oberbayerische Kreisirrenanstalt München. While participating in Gudden's famous degeneration studies, Panizza became psychotic. He quit his job and became a writer, trying to cope with psychotic episodes by publishing literary works. Most of his works were confiscated and Panizza himself was locked up and persecuted. His experience of his psychotic symptoms made him critical of the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time, and he preached a kind of psychological psychiatry that anticipated important features of the Antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s. After serving a year in prison for his writings, Panizza left Germany and went to Zürich, Switzerland. In 1898 he was deported from Switzerland and went to Paris, where his book of poems, Parisiana and his money were confiscated. In 1901 he had to return to the Oberbayerische Kreisirrenanstalt where a diagnosis of paranoia was made. Then he lived in Paris for the next three years, but his psychotic symptoms worsened and he fled back to the Oberbayerische Kreisirrenanstalt, where he was examined by Prof. Gudden, Dr. Ungemach and by his former colleague Emil Kraepelin, who had become head of department. The encounters with Oskar Panizza gave Emil Kraepelin some of the ideas on which he developed his concept of 'paraphrenias' and in Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry , Kraepelin illustrated the 'systematic paraphrenias', by the life of his former colleague Oskar Panizza who died in hospital in Bayreuth in 1921.