The Inheritance of Manic-Depressive Insanity

The Depressive Phase of Manic-Depressive Insanity

IT iS to the genius of Kraepelin, whose death in 1926 must have spared him the pain of encountering Nazism, that we owe both the title and our present conception of manic-depressive insanity. This conception embraces far more than the clinical close relationship which sometimes exists between states of mania and states of melancholia. A good deal, in fact, was known about this relationship befo...

Ernst Rüdin’s Unpublished 1922-1925 Study “Inheritance of Manic-Depressive Insanity”: Genetic Research Findings Subordinated to Eugenic Ideology

In the early 20th century, there were few therapeutic options for mental illness and asylum numbers were rising. This pessimistic outlook favoured the rise of the eugenics movement. Heredity was assumed to be the principal cause of mental illness. Politicians, scientists and clinicians in North America and Europe called for compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill. Psychiatric genetic resea...

Genetics of manic depressive illness.

Manic depressive illness is a common and frequently debilitating familial psychiatric disorder. Efforts to understand the mechanisms of inheritance have been hindered by the complexity of the phenotype, which may range from benign mood swings to chronic psychosis, and by apparently nonmendelian modes of transmission. Early reports of linkage to chromosomal loci have fallen into doubt; however t...

Multiple biochemical correlates of manic-depressive illness.

[Affective equivalents in depressive and manic-depressive patients].