Neuropsychopharmacology and the Forgotten Language of Psychiatry Madness: From Psychiatry to Neuronology via Neuropsychopharmacology.

Abstract

This is an outline of a period in the history of "madness." It begins in the mid-19th century with the separation of the diagnostic concept of "psychosis" from the all-embracing diagnostic concept of "neurosis", and the discovery of "psychic refl ex" that was to become known as "conditional reflex." It continues with the development of the language of psychiatry, in "psychopathology" and "psychiatricnosology:" during the late-19th and early 20th century; the forgetting of the "language' by the late 1980s, and the revival of the language in the introduction of "structural psychopathology" and assessment instruments as the Diagnostic Criteria of Research (DCR) and Composite Diagnostic Evaluations (CODE), subsequently. The need for "nosological homotyping" is considered for the generation of pharmacologically homogenous psychiatric populations for neuropsychopharmacological research and the possibility of using "structural psychopathology" for linking mental pathology with conditional refl ex variables is raised. The outline concludes with the assertion that in the light of developments, time has come to replace the term "psychiatry" with the term "neuronology." (Neuropsychopharmacol Hung 2021; 23(2): 249-265).