Les grandes étapes de l'histoire de la psychogériatrie

With, in first line, the question of dementia, “psychogeriatrics” is now a discipline located at the border between several specialities, in particular psychology of ageing, psychiatry, neurology and, more recently, gerontology and geriatrics. But the history of the psychogeriatrics started, in reality, during the nineteenth century inside psychiatry, busy to born itself. The contributions of Pinel, Esquirol and their successors, in France, but also in Germany with in particular Emil Kraepelin, were fundamental. After having evoked the description, often more literary than medical, of the psychic disorders of the old people, this paper presents the different stages which built psychogeriatrics, its individualization like particular working and its development since about thirty years - with the hesitation of several authors, in France, between the words “psychogeriatrics” and “gerontopsychiatrics”.