Kraepelin Schizophrenia Essay

The original concept of schizophrenia can be credited to Emil Kraepelin. In the early nineteen century, Kraepelin observed patients in an insane asylum. He originally named the illness “dementia praecox,” which translated into “dementia of early life” (Warner, 2004). He then continued to classify the patients into three conditions: “Hebephrenia” which is characterized by aimless, disorganized and/or incongruous behaviour; “Catonia,” where the patient is pessimistic, agitated, and sometimes motionless and/or incoherent. The last condition was called “Dementia Paranoids,” in which patients had dominant delusions of persecution (Warner, 2004). All of these were symptoms of what we call schizophrenia today. However, the symptoms of schizophrenia can range from very mild forms to highly severe forms – not every patient was the same. Eugen Bleuler took this range into account; Bleuler acknowledged Kraepelin’s research and modified it to have a much broader scope (Maj 1999). Bleuler gave …show more content…
Based on a study that used 19 schizophrenia patients and 19 others as a control group, tests were conducted during MRI scans to find information about schizophrenia on a neural level. Test subjects were given a Voice Emotion Identification Task where they had to determine the emotions of the speaker. As a result, it was found that Schizophrenic patients had a “lower fractional anisotropy values within primary and secondary auditory pathways, orbitofrontal cortex, corpus callosum, and peri-amygdala white matter” (Leitman et al., 2007). Fractional anisotropy is a measurement of the connectivity in the brain (Grieve et al., 2007); in this study it showed that schizophrenia is associated with disturbances at the level of the primary auditory cortex (Leitman et al., 2007). This may be the reason for the prominent auditory hallucinations that schizophrenic patients