Sunday, March 29, 2015

The psychogenic legacy of Adolf Meyer

Useful paper by Jordan Devylder on Adolf Meyer's psychogenic model of schizophrenia (dementia praecox), relevant to a previous post, summarises what I have been trying to say about Meyer. The article describes the development of Meyer's psychogenic theory in the context of related work in the period from Kraepelin to Bleuler. It reminds us that Kraepelin provided a "provisional and very indefinite" hypothesis that the biological cause of dementia praecox was intoxication from the sex glands causing a poisoning of the brain during puberty. As Meyer said, this was a theory that was "so vague as to demand consideration only if actual facts can be adduced and other facts should fail".

The article argues that we are beginning to see a revival of Meyerian psychiatry. I'm not convinced by Devylder's attempt to link this with the stress-vulnerability model, which is essentially still biomedical. However, as he says, "Meyer's legacy ... is the psychogenic perspective" (see my chapter The biopsychological approach in psychiatry: The Meyerian legacy in my edited book Critical psychiatry: The limits of madness).

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