History of Schizophrenia

This gang was able to control people’s minds, “forcing magnetic fluid so that facial muscles were forced to laugh or grimace” and they were able to “speak in the brain” in a “silent transport of intelligence into the intellectual atmosphere” of the brain. 

James Mathews’ story is generated disputes between his family, the representatives of medicine and the government, as well as controversies within the medical group.  He remained almost two decades years in Bethlem Hospital.  He had delusions and chronic hallucinations, dying a year after his discharge from the hospital. This case is the first reliable example of that condition that 100 years later would be named schizophrenia. 

Between 1868 and 1874, a German psychiatrist described a syndrome relevant to this history: catatonia. 

“A state in which the patient sits, quietly or completely mute, immobile, without anything making him change position, with the appearance of being absorbed in the contemplation of an object, with his eyes fixed on a distant point and without any apparent volition, nor reaction to sensory impressions” 

Some patients went on to intellectual deterioration, but others had amazing recoveries. He emphasized the presence of “epileptiform seizures,” which suggested neurological causes in some patients. Today we know that viral and autoimmune encephalitis cause catatonia, seizures and mental disorders. The evidence that schizophrenia is a biologically-based disease of the brain has accumulated rapidly during the past two decades. Recently this evidence has been also been supported with dynamic brain imaging systems that show very precisely the wave of tissue destruction that takes place in the brain that is suffering from schizophrenia. 

In 1907, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler changed the name of dementia praecox by coining the neologism schizophrenia, which means “division (or splitting) of the mind”.  To justify this etymological choice, he wrote: “I call early dementia schizophrenia because the splitting of psychic functions is one of its most important characteristics” 

The metaphor of a division, separation, splitting, rupture or fragmentation of the mind was part of the romantic psychology of the 19th century, and became part of the literary culture, as can be seen in the story of Robert Stevenson, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde.  This metaphor, whose supporters took it as a reality, also penetrated the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. This largely explains the almost immediate acceptance of the clinical neologism; it was not only a point of convergence between biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis: it was also an articulation between academic and popular culture.