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History of Schizophrenia

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History of Schizophrenia
Stephanie Fernandez
California Baptist University

History of Schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental illness that people have been dealing with throughout history. When we look at research as early as the 1800s, we find that there is evidence of individuals who were dealing with schizophrenia. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), Schizophrenia is defined as abnormalities in five domains which are delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and speech, disorganized or abnormal motor behavior, and negative symptoms (p. 87). For this reason, this article will examine the history of Schizophrenia from three time periods which is in the 1800s, mid 1900s, and in the 21st century.
1800s
In the 1817, the first moral-treated asylum was opened in America by the Philadelphia Quakers along with the Congregational Church in 1818 (Whitaker, 2002, p. 25). The Quakers and the church would not use any form of treatment to treat the mentally ill, however; they would help the people cope with their illness by creating activities for them such as gardening or playing games (Whitaker, 2002, p. 26). In the asylum, there were people who varied in mental illnesses. Emil Kraepelin, a psychiatrist, was one of the first people who presented schizophrenia in a category which he called dementia praecox. He would diagnose his patients by putting them into categories based on the symptoms and the patterns of the symptoms (Lyons and Martin, 2014, p. 33). Kraepelin believed that those who had schizophrenia was because of a genetic or biological cause. He believed that schizophrenia, or dementia praecox was caused because of an abnormality in the person’s sex glands. Kraepelin was a large contributor to the finding of schizophrenia as a mental illness (Lyon and Martin, 2014, p. 34). Some of the treatments that

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