High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The word schizophrenia was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911, and was intended to describe the separation of function between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. However, the history of ‘schizophrenia’ is not easy to write. According to some, the disease has always existed only to be ‘discovered’ during the early 20th century. The plausibility of this claim depends upon the success of retrospectively diagnosing earlier cases of madness as ‘schizophrenia’. According to others, ‘schizophrenia’ names a culturally-determined clustering of mental symptoms. What is known for sure is that by the turn of the 20th century the old concept of insanity had become fragmented into ‘diseases’ (psychoses) such as paranoia, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity and epilepsy (Emil Kraepelin’s classification). Dementia praecox was reconstituted as schizophrenia, paranoia was renamed as ‘delusional disorder’ and manic-depressive insanity as ‘bipolar disorder’ (epilepsy was transferred from psychiatry to neurology). It is important to emphasize that the ‘mental symptoms’ included under the concept schizophrenia are real enough, make people suffer, and will always need understanding and treatment. However, whether the historical construct currently called ‘schizophrenia’ is required to achieve this therapeutic goal remains a moot point.