THE GENERA IN CERTAIN GREAT GROUPS OR ORDERS OF MENTAL DISEASE

Abstract

I want to present to the American Neurological Association certain amplifications of material presented in 1917 as a key to the practical grouping of mental diseases. Under the eleven groups of mental diseases defined in 1917, I wish to place such practical subdivisions as seem to me confirmed by American psychiatric experience. As I find that many persons hardly distinguish between a classification and a key and labor under the impression that I am trying to erect a novel classification of mental diseases, let me insist that I am proposing nothing but a key to the classification of mental diseases according to the entities which I find in common diagnostic usage. I am elsewhere insisting on the extraordinary unanimity which American psychiatrists are now displaying on the matter of psychotic entities. There is, in fact, hardly enough controversy to indicate a healthy progress in the matter of theoretical psychiatry. (There