psychosis The Greek
psyche (‘life’ or ‘soul’) today can be translated as ‘mind’. The suffix ‘-osis’ means ‘any illness of’.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines psychosis as:
Any kind of mental affectation or derangement; especially one which cannot be ascribed to organic lesion or neurosis. In modern use, any mental illness or disorder that is accompanied by hallucinations, delusions or mental confusion and a loss of contact with external reality, whether attributable to an organic lesion or not.The question of how far psychosis is an organic condition of the body or brain has fascinated psychiatrists ever since the term's origins a century and a half ago.
Origin of the term
The mid-nineteenth-century Austrian poet, politician, and psychiatrist, Feuchtersleben, introduced ‘psychosis’ to denote serious mental conditions affecting the personality; it was a subcategory of (Cullen's) neuroses. Psychosis soon comprised conditions besides the insanities and mental handicap, including minor psychological conditions and major organic disorders. Feuchtersleben coined the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychopathy’ as identical terms because they were ‘diseases of the personality’ — and not of the body, nor of the soul or of the mind alone.
Psychosis-neurosis debate
Neurosis was already a popular term, and psychosis and neurosis were soon viewed in conjunction. Psychosis was seen as the psychological aspect of a neurosis — hence
psychoneurosis. Thus the confusing picture arose whereby, in the late nineteenth century, there were three terms — psychosis, psychoneurosis, and psychopathy — for the same condition; by the late twentieth century by contrast these terms all referred to separate conditions. The development of this process of change over the course of the century will now be outlined, along with the different types of psychosis that were described.
At the end of the nineteenth century, attempts were made to find organic/cerebral causes for mental illnesses. The trend of ‘organicization’ increased and culminated in the discovery in 1905 that general paralysis was caused by a physical agent (syphilis). However, there remained many mental disorders that had no known organic cause. The term ‘functional’ was applied to these psychoses in 1881 by the German psychiatrist Fuerstner. However, his compatriot, the anatomist Nissl, claimed that ‘in all psychoses of whatever type there are always positive cortical findings’ (i.e. anatomical evidence of pathology). A functional illness therefore meant one that was suspected of having a physical origin, which had not yet been discovered.
By the mid 1920s, in the absence of the discovery of physical causes for Kraepelin's dementia praecox (schizophrenia) or for manic–depressive insanity, Bumke, his successor as Professor of Psychiatry at the world famous Chair in Munich, unequivocally labelled these as functional as opposed to organic illnesses. An examination of the latter should be conducted in the
brain, while the study of the former had to be made in the mind, according to Bumke. The highly influential psychiatrist and philosopher Jaspers listed the functional psychoses as schizophrenia, manic–depressive insanity, and
epilepsy.
Today, using computerized
imaging techniques, we know that functional psychoses are accompanied by organic changes in the brain. This has made the use of the term ‘functional psychosis’ unhelpful. In the nineteenth century, many mental disorders were considered to be due to
degeneration, that is ‘being predisposed to a disorder which led to deterioration, either in that individual or in succeeding generations’. These disorders were termed ‘endogenous’, which could apply both to the psychoses and to disorders of personality (psychopathies).
In 1881 the German degenerationist psychiatrist, Schuele, began the process whereby psychoses were associated with the more serious, organic conditions — cerebropsychoses — and psychoneuroses with the less serious ones. Freud emphasized and popularized the ‘psychoneuroses’ at the turn of the century, and the successful treatment of otherwise healthy soldiers suffering from shellshock in World War I established the entity of the
neuroses, as they were to become known.
By 1925 Bumke was writing that ‘there has been no such thing as psychoneuroses for a long time. They have been reclassified into nervous reactions (neuroses), nervous constitutional states, psychopathies and functional psychoses.’ The neuroses were further delineated from the psychoses by Jaspers because ‘they do not wholly involve the individual himself, while those which seize upon the individual as a whole are called psychoses … [and] are generally thought to open up a gulf between sickness and health.’
In the early twentieth century, various terms were used for those conditions, which were deemed psychoses but which were not manic– depressive insanity or schizophrenia, but in the main these two remained the recognized ‘mental illnesses’. Some have upheld the significance of atypical psychoses. The recent debate on these psychoses has also generated much renewed research in the unitary theory of mental illness.
Unitary psychosis
In the mid nineteenth century, the unitary psychosis theory referred to a continuum of mental conditions from health to disease and was based on the importance of symptoms. In the twentieth century, by contrast, the term ‘unitary psychosis’ was applied to the two psychoses, schizophrenia and manic–depressive insanity, with the atypical psychoses bridging these two. Contemporary British psychiatrists have split two ways in their views on this question. Some, who analysed symptoms and emphasized the genetic basis of these disorders, have favoured the concept of unitary psychosis. Others, on the basis of neuroimaging, have rejected the unitary theory in favour of three categories of psychosis: congenital dementia praecox with poor prognosis; an adult form of schizophrenia with good prognosis; and bipolar affective disorder.
‘Psychosis’ — useful or not
There are certain problems with the use of ‘psychosis’ in contemporary psychiatry. Firstly, its very definition is difficult because its defining criteria are not specific (
Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry). ‘Lack of insight’ is difficult to define. If ‘severity of illness’ is used as a criterion, the problem then arises that conditions falling into the psychosis category can occur in mild as well as severe forms. Moreover, non-psychotic conditions such as obsessional–compulsive disorder can also be very severe. ‘Impaired contact with reality, as evidenced by delusions and hallucinations’ has been considered difficult to apply. Secondly, conditions to which the term refers appear to have little in common, especially from an aetiological viewpoint. For example, some psychoses can be caused by known organic factors, while others represent a severe depressive illness. Thirdly, it may be better to classify an individual condition like schizophrenia as such, rather than as a member of an umbrella term like psychosis. So, recent classifications have renamed
paranoid psychosis as
paranoid disorder and
affective psychosis as
bipolar affective disorder. Fourthly, the tenth International Classification of Diseases (ICD 10) no longer distinguishes between psychosis and neurosis.
The arguments for retaining the term are as follows. Firstly, the psychoses are recognizable — as the ICD 10 proposes — by the presence of delusions and hallucinations without the patient having insight into their morbid nature. Secondly, on a purely practical level, psychosis has carried with it less stigma than the alternative term of ‘insanity’. Thirdly, it is very difficult always to use the term ‘disorder’ as an alternative for psychosis. For example, when it comes to the atypical psychoses the term ‘atypical disorder’ or ‘atypical insanity’ is unsatisfactory. Fourthly, the adjectival use of psychosis is a helpful shorthand term. This can be as in ‘psychotic symptom’ (delusion or hallucination) or ‘antipsychotic’ medication. To use ‘severe unipolar depression with delusions, hallucinations, and loss of insight’ as a replacement for ‘psychotic depression’ is cumbersome.
The contemporary British professor of psychiatry, Tyrer, has written that ‘classification stands or falls by its usefulness.’ In the last two decades the psychiatric profession has made many improvements in the sphere of reliability, but it has been said that there has not been comparable progress in the validity of psychiatric diseases. Therefore, there is a continuing need for the ‘umbrella’ categories such as psychosis and neurosis. The danger with an unquestioning use, and one which does not take cognisance of its abuse and attempted reification as a disease concept earlier this century, is that the mistakes of the past are repeated and an overly organic approach is adopted at the expense of a careful consideration of other — for example psychosocial — factors.
In a clinical and pragmatic sense the combination of one of the definitions of psychosis as ‘gross impairment in reality testing’ and the evident possibility in clinical practice of differentiating psychosis from normality, make psychosis a term that is accessible and acceptable, and yet one which does not necessarily carry the longer term or immutable connotations of its fellow term ‘insane’. Thus for the clinician and the man in the street, a psychotic person differs qualitatively from normal, while someone suffering an understandable neurotic or emotional disturbance usually only differs quantitatively from normal. The psychiatric profession should continue to use the term, but its conceptual limitations should not be overlooked.
M. Dominic Beer
Bibliography
Berrios, G. E. and and Beer, M. D. (1995). Unitary psychosis concept. In A history of clinical psychiatry. The origin and history of psychiatric disorders, (ed.) G. E. Berrios and R. Porter. Athlone Press, London.
See also
psychological disorders;
psychosomatic illness.
