50 Fun Facts About Psychiatry

Which drug did the young Sigmund Freud champion in the 1880s as a stimulant and a cure for morphine addiction?

Cocaine fascinated Freud, who used it himself and narrowly missed the credit for discovering its value as an anaesthetic in eye surgery.

Which word for uproar and confusion comes from the nickname of a London psychiatric hospital founded in 1247?

Bedlam was the nickname of Bethlem Royal Hospital, whose governors once raised revenue by opening the wards to general visitors as a spectacle.

Which battery metal did Australian psychiatrist John Cade discover could calm mania in the late 1940s?

Lithium became the first effective medication for a mental illness after Cade noticed that laboratory animals injected with it grew unusually restful.

Which European capital gave its name to a syndrome after bank hostages there bonded with their captors in 1973?

Stockholm gave the syndrome its name after four bank employees were held in a vault for six days, though many details of the famous case are disputed.

Which fictional serial killer worked as a forensic psychiatrist in Baltimore before his capture and imprisonment?

Hannibal Lecter won Anthony Hopkins the Best Actor Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which an FBI trainee consults the jailed doctor about another killer.

Which masterpiece did Vincent van Gogh paint in 1889 from the view out of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy?

The Starry Night shows the view from his east-facing window just before sunrise, with an imaginary village added beneath the hills.

Which New York World reporter feigned insanity in 1887 to expose brutality inside the Blackwell's Island women's asylum?

Nellie Bly took the undercover job from Joseph Pulitzer's paper while penniless, and published her account as Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Which brain operation, now discredited, won Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz a share of the 1949 Nobel Prize?

Lobotomy, which Moniz called leucotomy, grew from his belief that mental illness came from abnormal connections in the frontal lobe.

Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach built his 1921 personality test around ten cards showing what kind of image?

Inkblots let Rorschach record what people perceived in ambiguous shapes; he died the year after his test appeared, aged only 37.

Which British king's final relapse into mental illness in 1810 led to his eldest son ruling as Prince Regent?

George III showed symptoms that historians think fit either bipolar disorder or porphyria, though the exact nature of his illness is not known.

Which French term for a delusion passed between close companions became the subtitle of the 2024 Joker sequel?

Folie à deux, literally 'madness of two', is a rare syndrome in which one person's delusional belief is transmitted to another.

In which HBO drama does psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi treat a New Jersey Mafia boss for panic attacks?

The Sopranos made therapy its backbone: creator David Chase was in psychotherapy himself and modelled Melfi on his own psychiatrist.

Which Batman villain was written as a former Arkham Asylum psychiatrist who fell for her patient, the Joker?

Harley Quinn did not start in the comics: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm created her for a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 book On Death and Dying described five stages that begin with which reaction?

Denial opens a sequence that runs on through anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, a pattern she drew from work with dying patients.

Which ADHD stimulant, first made at the Swiss firm Ciba in 1944, was named after its chemist's wife?

Ritalin honours Marguerite Panizzon, known as Rita, whose husband Leandro was the first to synthesise methylphenidate.

The old diagnosis of hysteria takes its name from the ancient Greek word for which part of the body?

The uterus, hystera in Greek, was once believed to wander around the body and cause disturbed behaviour.

Which Hoffmann-La Roche tranquilliser was the best-selling medication in the United States between 1968 and 1982?

Valium, the brand name of diazepam, sold more than 2 billion tablets in 1978 alone and was the second drug of its family invented by Leo Sternbach.

Which brand name did Eli Lilly give fluoxetine, the antidepressant that the company's chemists invented in 1972?

Prozac is prescribed well beyond depression, including for panic disorder, bulimia and obsessive–compulsive disorder.

Which signer of the Declaration of Independence was later recognised as the father of American psychiatry?

Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, was given the title by the American Psychiatric Association in 1965 for his study of mental disorder.

Which sitcom psychiatrist left the Boston bar of Cheers for Seattle, where he hosts a radio advice show?

Frasier Crane debuted in 1984 as a love interest for Diane Chambers in the third season of Cheers, then outlasted the bar with his own spin-off.

The word lunatic preserves an ancient belief that epilepsy and bouts of madness were caused by what?

The Moon sits inside the word, from Latin lunaticus, 'moonstruck'; English law went on calling patients lunatics until an Act of 1930.

Which author drew on his job as a veterans' hospital aide to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Ken Kesey also volunteered at the same hospital for a drug study that turned out to be financed by the CIA under Project MKULTRA.

Whose shooting by John Hinckley Jr. ended in an insanity acquittal that made US lawmakers narrow the defence?

Ronald Reagan was wounded in 1981 by Hinckley, who hoped to impress the actress Jodie Foster and then spent over three decades in psychiatric care.

Which Swiss psychiatrist, once Sigmund Freud's chosen heir, gave psychology the terms introvert and extravert?

Carl Jung split from Freud by playing down sexual development, then founded his own school, which he called analytical psychology.

Which term did Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduce in 1908 to replace the older label dementia praecox?

Schizophrenia was one of several lasting words Bleuler coined, along with schizoid, depth psychology and ambivalence.

Which German psychiatrist's study of asylum patient Auguste Deter described the dementia that now bears his name?

Alois Alzheimer first observed her at the Frankfurt asylum in 1901, and hers became the first published case of what was then called presenile dementia.

Which French physician, appointed to Paris's Bicêtre Hospital in 1793, worked to end the chaining of asylum patients?

Philippe Pinel learned his humane methods from Jean-Baptiste Pussin, the hospital's unschooled custodian, to whom he virtually apprenticed himself.

Which eating disorder was named in 1873 by Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria's personal physicians?

Anorexia nervosa borrows the Greek for 'a loss of appetite', though the condition is marked by a fear of gaining weight and a strong desire to be thin.

Which condition did Johns Hopkins child psychiatrist Leo Kanner describe in a landmark 1943 study of eleven children?

Autism, in Kanner's account, showed in children with a strong wish to be alone and an insistence that routines stay the same.

Johann Christian Reil coined the word psychiatry in 1808 from Greek roots meaning the medical treatment of what?

The soul, psykhe in Greek, supplies the first half of the word; Reil, a German physician, joined it to a root meaning 'to heal'.

Which German psychiatrist is credited with splitting psychosis into dementia praecox and manic-depressive illness?

Emil Kraepelin sorted illnesses by their pattern of symptoms over time, and his textbook grew through nine editions, the last published after his death.

SSRI antidepressants such as paroxetine and citalopram are named for blocking the reuptake of which brain chemical?

Serotonin is the second S in SSRI, short for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and the same drugs are also used to treat anxiety disorders.

Chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic on the market, was developed in 1950 and sold under which brand name?

Thorazine, also sold as Largactil, still has uses outside psychiatry, including severe nausea and hiccups that resist other treatment.

Ugo Cerletti conceived electroconvulsive therapy after watching which animals stunned with electricity before slaughter?

Pigs being anaesthetised by electroshock before butchering gave Cerletti the idea, and in April 1938 he and Lucio Bini first treated a human patient.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the first psychiatrist to win a Nobel Prize, treated neurosyphilis by inoculating which disease?

Malaria was inoculated for the fevers it induced, an approach called pyrotherapy, and it worked against what was then a terminal illness.

Which hormone did Vienna doctor Manfred Sakel use from the 1930s to put psychotic patients into repeated comas?

Insulin shock therapy was used in hospitals worldwide through the 1940s and 1950s, then fell out of favour as antipsychotic drugs replaced it.

Which religious group founded the York Retreat in 1796, pioneering the humane 'moral treatment' of asylum patients?

Quakers under William Tuke opened the Retreat for their own members only, and its methods became a model for asylums around the world.

Which reformer's lobbying of state legislatures and Congress helped create America's first generation of mental asylums?

Dorothea Dix took up the cause after teaching women prisoners in East Cambridge, and later served as Superintendent of Army Nurses in the Civil War.

Which German doctor, who divided Paris with his theory of 'animal magnetism', lent his name to a word for hypnosis?

Franz Mesmer believed an invisible natural energy passed between all objects; Scottish doctor James Braid later reworked the technique as hypnotism.

Which Bosnian Serb leader, later convicted of genocide by a UN tribunal, trained as a psychiatrist in Sarajevo?

Radovan Karadžić spent his years as a fugitive under an alias, working at a private alternative-medicine clinic in Belgrade until his arrest in 2008.

Which Martinique-born psychiatrist worked at Algeria's Blida hospital before writing The Wretched of the Earth?

Frantz Fanon joined Algeria's National Liberation Front during the war of independence, and Jean-Paul Sartre agreed to write the preface to his last book.

Which 1964 presidential nominee gives his name to the rule against psychiatrists diagnosing public figures from afar?

Barry Goldwater had been the subject of a 1964 Fact magazine poll that asked psychiatrists whether he was fit to be president.

Which country is home to Geel, where the cult of Saint Dymphna inspired centuries of community psychiatric care?

Belgium's Geel has let patients go into town and mix with the community since the 13th century, long before anyone spoke of de-institutionalisation.

The EEG, first recorded in a human by psychiatrist Hans Berger in 1924, tracks which feature of the brain?

Electrical activity is what an EEG records directly; Berger coined the word electroencephalogram and discovered the alpha rhythm, once called the Berger wave.

Psychiatrist Eric Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize for studying how memories form in which simple animals?

Sea slugs of the genus Aplysia were his choice after he found that memory in mammals was too complex to yield the basic processes.

Which word for drugs such as LSD did Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist working in Saskatchewan, coin in the 1950s?

Psychedelic made its debut at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences; Osmond also tried to cure alcoholics with LSD in the late 1950s.

Which Hungarian-American psychiatrist's 1961 book called mental illness a myth and attacked involuntary treatment?

Thomas Szasz insisted he was not anti-psychiatry: he practised it with consenting adults and objected only to coercion.

In David Rosenhan's 1973 study, healthy volunteers reportedly got into psychiatric hospitals by faking which symptom?

Hearing voices was their only complaint in Rosenhan's account, which said each was diagnosed and given antipsychotic drugs; a 2019 investigation found the published study distorted.

Which medieval French king reportedly had iron rods sewn into his clothes because he believed he was made of glass?

Charles VI, nicknamed first the Beloved and later the Mad, suffered psychotic episodes through a reign that lasted more than forty years.

Which pseudoscience, founded by a German physician in 1796, judged mental traits from the bumps on a person's skull?

Phrenology held that the brain was made up of 27 separate organs, and it was at its most influential from about 1810 until 1840.