Ewald Hecker (20 October 1843, Halle – 11 January 1909,

Wiesbaden Wiesbaden (; ) is the capital of the German state of Hesse, and the second-largest Hessian city after Frankfurt am Main. With around 283,000 inhabitants, it is List of cities in Germany by population, Germany's 24th-largest city. Wiesbaden form ...

) was a German

psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry. Psychiatrists are physicians who evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments or strictly ...

who was an important figure in the early days of modern

psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior. ...

. He is known for research done with his mentor, psychiatrist

Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (28 December 1828 – 15 April 1899) was a German psychiatrist. Life and career In 1855 he received his medical doctorate at Berlin, and subsequently worked as a physician at the mental asylum in Wehlau. For a period he ...

(1828-1899). In the early 1870s Kahlbaum and Hecker did a series of studies on young

psychotic In psychopathology, psychosis is a condition in which a person is unable to distinguish, in their experience of life, between what is and is not real. Examples of psychotic symptoms are delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized or incoher ...

patients at Kahlbaum's clinic in

Görlitz Görlitz (; ; ; ; ; Lusatian dialects, East Lusatian: , , ) is a town in the Germany, German state of Saxony. It is on the river Lusatian Neisse and is the largest town in Upper Lusatia, the second-largest town in the region of Lusatia after ...

, Prussia. Together they provided clinical analyses of the mentally ill, and arranged their disorders into specific, descriptive categories. It was during this period that Hecker developed the concepts of

hebephrenia Disorganized schizophrenia, or hebephrenia, is an obsolete term for a subtype of schizophrenia. It is no longer recognized as a separate condition, following the publication of the ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth E ...

and

cyclothymia Cyclothymia (, ), also known as cyclothymic disorder, psychothemia / psychothymia, bipolar III, affective personality disorder and cyclothymic personality disorder, is a mental disorder, mental and Abnormal behaviour, behavioural Disease#Disorder ...

. He described hebephrenia as a disorder that begins in adolescence with erratic behaviour followed by a rapid decline of all mental functions, and cyclothymia as a cyclical mood disorder. The pioneering research of Kahlbaum and Hecker proposed the existence of more than one discrete psychiatric disorder, which contrasted with the concept of "

unitary psychosis Unitary psychosis (''Einheitspsychose'') refers to the 19th-century belief prevalent in German psychiatry until the era of Emil Kraepelin that all forms of psychosis were surface variations of a single underlying disease process. According to this ...

" that maintained all psychiatric symptoms were manifestations of a single mental disorder.Emil Wilhelm Magnus Georg Kraepelin (1856–1926).
''American Journal of Psychiatry.'' Hecker had progressive ideas concerning treatment of the mentally ill, and was an advocate in establishing a humane environment for mental patients. In 1891 he purchased a private psychiatric hospital in

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hecker, Ewald German psychiatrists 1843 births 1909 deaths Bipolar disorder researchers People from Halle (Saale) History of psychiatry

References

Further reading

External links