Etiology of Schizophrenia: Perspectives from Childhood Psychoses

Abstract

Schizophrenic psychoses in childhood were delineated as specific psychotic disorders only in the late 1930s (Lutz 1937/1938). But the history of childhood schizophrenia starts earlier. Hermann Emminghaus, who wrote the first textbook of child psychiatry in 1887 with the title Psychic Disturbances of Childhood, describes childhood psychoses as “cerebral neurasthenia” and defines these disorders as “neuroses of the brain characterized by a reduction of cognitive abilities, mood changes, sleep disturbances and manyfold anomalies of innervation with a subacute or chronic course and different states of outcome” (Emminghaus 1887, p. 134). Emminghaus was also the first who introduced the developmental perspective into child psychiatry with special focus on psychoses. After Emil Kraepelin, at the end of the past century, first described dementia praecox (Kraepelin 1886) and Eugen Bleuler (1911) introduced the term “schizophrenia”, August Homburger stated, in his famous textbook (Homburger 1926), that childhood schizophrenia really exists and may be characterized by the following features: (a) A predominant change of the personality of the children in the direction of withdrawal, negativism, and strange and unexpected behavior.