Chapter 1
Welcome to Prozacland
§1. From symptom to syndrome. When Emil Kraepelin published the sixth edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie in 1899, he had for some time already been a model of scientific success â a model, that is, according to the standards of German science of his day.1 At the age of thirty, he was made Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu), in what is now Estonia, quickly becoming head of his department, and then of the hospital attached to it, which he led with strict discipline. From the publication of the first edition of the Lehrbuch, in the same year as his habilitation,2 Kraepelin articulated his programme in a way that left no room for doubt: psychiatry must join the ranks of the experimental sciences, and aspire to become a branch of medicine. To do this, it would have to give up the metaphysical preoccupations that had marred the development of psychology, to concentrate on what was most important â understanding the physical causes of mental illnesses.3 Of course, Kraepelin was not the only one to claim to have brought the field of the medicine of madness into line with the most robust sciences â his teacher, Wilhelm Wundt, himself belonged to what was already a long tradition of psychiatrists who had dreamed of hard knowledge.4 But there was at least one respect in which he set himself apart from his predecessors: his desire to establish a complete clinical picture of the main forms of mental illness, with a view to providing, at last, a system of classification. By turning to the observation of their physical causes, it became possible, he believed, to resolve the difficulties created by the analysis of isolated symptoms, which he grouped together into large families of what he called âsyndromesâ.5 With the publication of each new edition of the Lehrbuch, the nosographic designations and the classificatory networks proliferated from his pen, introducing numerous categories destined for great success. One of the most important amongst these, introduced in the fourth edition of the treatise in 1893, was certainly âdementia praecoxâ, which covered every case in which the development of a âmental weaknessâ at an inappropriate age was observed. Even though it had been decisively reformulated, it was not, however, this category that made the greatest impression in 1899, but the appearance of a new one, whose sophistication came from the most brutal of short-circuits: âmanic-depressive psychosisâ.6
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§2. When being errs. Unexpectedly, for those unfamiliar with his work, Kraepelin did not provide a definition of âmanic-depressive psychosisâ (or manisch-depressiven Irresein in German), contenting himself with describing the features grouped under this name. These were of either a physical or psychic type, with the latter â present in greater number in Kraepelinâs description â including âsensory disordersâ and âdelusional disordersâ, âavolitionâ and âlogorrheaâ.7 Taken in isolation, none of these symptoms would have seemed new; it was their grouping together, and their singular mode of temporal extension, even across generations, that justified the invention of the âmanic-depressive psychosisâ category. That âmelancholicâ states could sometimes alternate with âmanicâ states bordering on possession was actually something that observers of the human soul had noted since antiquity â it had become a platitude. From Aretaeus of Cappadocia, between the first and fourth centuries CE, to Robert Jamesâ Medicinal Dictionary in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was understood that, despite their differences, melancholia and mania were two sides of the same illness.8 In a sense, Kraepelin had been happy simply to synthesize this history into a single nosographic category, which he went on to describe in greater depth than anyone before â anchoring it decisively in the physical domain. For him, the only interest of âmanic-depressive psychosisâ was that it gave rise to notable signs â signs whose composition would indicate with certainty the treatment that needed to be prescribed, if indeed there was one. On this point, Kraepelin was hardly an optimist; as he got older, his insistence on the physical dimension of mental illnesses had brought him to defend positions that increasingly leant towards eugenics, and the genetic control of races.9 Once it had been accepted that physical characteristics were transmitted from generation to generation, it seemed certain to him that mental illnesses, or at least the predisposition to develop them, were also transmitted, with no hope of recovery or redemption. Madness was not an accident that it was possible to survive; it was part of the very being (Sein) of the sufferer, whose erring (Irre) must continue inevitably, even beyond itself.
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§3. What is excitation? Even though he did not risk a definition of âmanic-depressive psychosisâ, a disturbing element kept cropping up as Kraepelin went through the symptoms of the illness: âexcitationâ. Whatever the symptom described, it was differentiated according to the âstate of excitationâ of the patient, which could refer to a physical or psychic agitation, could be positive or negative, and could relate to the âmanicâ or the âdepressiveâ phase. More than the symptom itself, it was its intensification by âexcitationâ that should hold the observerâs attention, and that, combined with other symptoms of the same order, would allow for the classification of the patient as a victim of âmanic-depressive psychosisâ.10 At one point, as he describes the patientâs âurgent need for activityâ, he admits it himself: the âincrease in excitabilityâ, intensifying excitation as such, should âperhapsâ be considered the âessential symptomâ.11 The capacity to be excited, more than the âexcitationâ it was possible to observe, constituted the essential core of the manic-depressive syndrome as Kraepelin understood it â the fact that someone afflicted by the illness could not stand still. The erring of the suffererâs being was neither linear nor planar; it took the form of an oscillation whose movement and amplitude were entirely unpredictable, except in that it was unlikely to stabilize at any point. The manic-depressive was more likely than others to climb aboard the ontological roller coaster, and to abandon beingâs stable state for a disequilibrium as extreme as it was permanent. In other words: âmanic-depressive psychosisâ was beingâs extreme state, once it had given up on its own constitutive principles â it was extreme dĂ©sĂȘtre, the disorder of being as irresistible temptation. That was what troubled Kraepelin: excitation, for him, meant a rupture in the world order â a regime of intensity challenging the way in which being orientates itself so that it can be qualified as sane. To get rid of the illness, therefore, you would have to attack the capacity to be excited â which is to say, the bodily element that carried being away into extreme regions that no normal human should be allowed to frequent.
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§4. Enter chloral. Kraepelinâs physicalism could have remained a curiosity, relegated to the margins of the history of psychiatry â but, in a few years, it had become the default setting for thinking about mental illnesses in Europe, and then, later, in the United States.12 This delay is explained by the success that psychoanalysis enjoyed in America at the beginning of the twentieth century â a success based on the opposite hypothesis to Kraepelinâs, namely that the milieu of mental illness was the psyche, with language as its epistemological vehicle.13 If Kraepelinâs theory ultimately prevailed across the Atlantic as well, it was because, whatever the hypotheses, there was a point on which everyone agreed â the treatment methods for manic-depressive disorder, or, rather, its principle symptom, excitation. While Kraepelin did not provide any therapeutic advice in his observations on âmanic-depressive psychosisâ, his clinical practice, which he passed on to his successors, left no room for doubt on the subject. It must be said that the arsenal available to doctors had recently benefitted from considerable innovations in the world of ch...