University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics Medical Museum

Diagnostik

Historical Terms

Throughout the developing history of Psyschiatry, the terms used to describe mental illness have changed. The terminology presented here is drawn from Iowa State Psychopathic Hospital admissions books dated 1922-1929.

• Conversion Hysteria: related both to hysteria and psychoneurosis. Patients suffered from excessive stress and anxiety, which manifests itself in physical manifestations such as paralysis, blindness, deafness, tics and tremors.
• Cyclothymic Hysteria: symptoms like manic and major depressive disorder, but less severe.
• Dementia Praecox: premature dementia. The tern was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the condition now known as schizophrenia.
• Hebephrenia: disorganized schizophrenia.
• Hypophrenia: mentally retarded.
• Involution: rolling or turning inward, senile, the progressive degeneration that occurs with advancing age.
• Manic-Depressive Psychosis: (now called Bipolar Disorder) mood disorder in which the patient swings from one emotional extreme to another, experiencing both manic and depressive episodes.
• Neurasthenia: first coined in 1869 by George M. Beard, an American physician, neurasthenia or "nerve weakness" was believed to cause headaches, indigestion, anxiety, depression and insomnia among other ailments. It was thought that if the supply of "nerve force" was too weak or taxed, nervousness was the result.
• Psychopathic: (1) pertaining to antisocial behavior or antisocial personality disorder. (2) pertaining to mental disease.
• Psychoneurosis: Freud's term for neuroses such as hysteria, obsessions, and phobias originating in childhood experience.
• Paresis: progressive dementia and generalized paralysis originating from syphilis.
• Praecox: premature, early dementia (Dementia Praecox).
• Psychasthenia: an umbrella term used to cover all psychoneurosis not classified as hysteria, phobias, or anxiety.