Historia de los trastornos afectivos

The group of conditions called 'affective disorders' resulted from the convergence of certain words, concepts, and behaviors that took place during the early part of the twentieth century. The word 'affective' has itself a long and noble history and is part of a panoply of terms which include emotion, passion, sentiment, feeling, mood, dysthymia, cyclothymia, etc. Although these terms name overlapping subjective states, each has a different history and etymology. The semiology of affect disorders has never achieved the richness of the psychopathology of perception and cognition. This resulted from a long-term neglect and also from the obscurity of the subject matter itself. Our current notions of depression and mania date from the second half of the nineteenth century and emerged from the transformation of the old notions of melancholia and mania. The new clinical versions of them combined the new concept of alternating, periodic, circular, or double form insanity. This process culminated with Kraepelin's concept of 'manic-depressive insanity' which included most forms of affective disorder under the same umbrella. Finally, the overinclusive kraepelinian concept was fragmented by the works of Wernicke, Kleist, and Leonhard, capped with the proposal of Angst and Perris to differentiate between unipolar and bipolar psychoses, accepted since 1980 by the DSM-III.