Psychiatry
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50 free Psychiatry trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that treats the mind, and its history is one of the strangest in science. In little more than two centuries it has moved from locked asylums and bold, sometimes brutal experiments to modern medicines and talking therapies, and along the way it has given everyday English a surprising number of words. This quiz covers the doctors who shaped the field, the treatments that won prizes or were later abandoned, the origins of familiar diagnoses, and the medicines that changed how illness is treated. It also takes in the reformers and reporters who exposed bad care, and the psychiatrists of film, television and comics. The questions suit curious general readers as much as students of medicine, nursing or psychology. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind the fact as you play.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which drug did the young Sigmund Freud champion in the 1880s as a stimulant and a cure for morphine addiction?
Cocaine
Cocaine fascinated Freud, who used it himself and narrowly missed the credit for discovering its value as an anaesthetic in eye surgery.
Q 02Which word for uproar and confusion comes from the nickname of a London psychiatric hospital founded in 1247?
Bedlam
Bedlam was the nickname of Bethlem Royal Hospital, whose governors once raised revenue by opening the wards to general visitors as a spectacle.
Q 03Which battery metal did Australian psychiatrist John Cade discover could calm mania in the late 1940s?
Lithium
Lithium became the first effective medication for a mental illness after Cade noticed that laboratory animals injected with it grew unusually restful.
Q 04Which European capital gave its name to a syndrome after bank hostages there bonded with their captors in 1973?
Stockholm
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.
Q 05Which fictional serial killer worked as a forensic psychiatrist in Baltimore before his capture and imprisonment?
Hannibal Lecter
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.
Q 06Which masterpiece did Vincent van Gogh paint in 1889 from the view out of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy?
The Starry Night
The Starry Night shows the view from his east-facing window just before sunrise, with an imaginary village added beneath the hills.
Q 07Which New York World reporter feigned insanity in 1887 to expose brutality inside the Blackwell's Island women's asylum?
Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly took the undercover job from Joseph Pulitzer's paper while penniless, and published her account as Ten Days in a Mad-House.
Q 08Which brain operation, now discredited, won Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz a share of the 1949 Nobel Prize?
Lobotomy
Lobotomy, which Moniz called leucotomy, grew from his belief that mental illness came from abnormal connections in the frontal lobe.
Q 09Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach built his 1921 personality test around ten cards showing what kind of image?
Inkblots
Inkblots let Rorschach record what people perceived in ambiguous shapes; he died the year after his test appeared, aged only 37.
Q 10Which British king's final relapse into mental illness in 1810 led to his eldest son ruling as Prince Regent?
George III
George III showed symptoms that historians think fit either bipolar disorder or porphyria, though the exact nature of his illness is not known.
Q 11Which French term for a delusion passed between close companions became the subtitle of the 2024 Joker sequel?
Folie à deux
Folie à deux, literally 'madness of two', is a rare syndrome in which one person's delusional belief is transmitted to another.
Q 12In which HBO drama does psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi treat a New Jersey Mafia boss for panic attacks?
The Sopranos
The Sopranos made therapy its backbone: creator David Chase was in psychotherapy himself and modelled Melfi on his own psychiatrist.
Q 13Which Batman villain was written as a former Arkham Asylum psychiatrist who fell for her patient, the Joker?
Harley Quinn
Q 21The word lunatic preserves an ancient belief that epilepsy and bouts of madness were caused by what?
The Moon
The Moon sits inside the word, from Latin lunaticus, 'moonstruck'; English law went on calling patients lunatics until an Act of 1930.
Q 22Which author drew on his job as a veterans' hospital aide to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey also volunteered at the same hospital for a drug study that turned out to be financed by the CIA under Project MKULTRA.
Q 23Whose shooting by John Hinckley Jr. ended in an insanity acquittal that made US lawmakers narrow the defence?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Harley Quinn did not start in the comics: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm created her for a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
Q 14Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 book On Death and Dying described five stages that begin with which reaction?
Denial
Denial opens a sequence that runs on through anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, a pattern she drew from work with dying patients.
Q 15Which ADHD stimulant, first made at the Swiss firm Ciba in 1944, was named after its chemist's wife?
Ritalin
Ritalin honours Marguerite Panizzon, known as Rita, whose husband Leandro was the first to synthesise methylphenidate.
Q 16The old diagnosis of hysteria takes its name from the ancient Greek word for which part of the body?
The uterus
The uterus, hystera in Greek, was once believed to wander around the body and cause disturbed behaviour.
Q 17Which Hoffmann-La Roche tranquilliser was the best-selling medication in the United States between 1968 and 1982?
Valium
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.
Q 18Which brand name did Eli Lilly give fluoxetine, the antidepressant that the company's chemists invented in 1972?
Prozac
Prozac is prescribed well beyond depression, including for panic disorder, bulimia and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Q 19Which signer of the Declaration of Independence was later recognised as the father of American psychiatry?
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, was given the title by the American Psychiatric Association in 1965 for his study of mental disorder.
Q 20Which sitcom psychiatrist left the Boston bar of Cheers for Seattle, where he hosts a radio advice show?
Frasier Crane
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.
Q 24Which Swiss psychiatrist, once Sigmund Freud's chosen heir, gave psychology the terms introvert and extravert?
Carl Jung
Carl Jung split from Freud by playing down sexual development, then founded his own school, which he called analytical psychology.
Q 25Which term did Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduce in 1908 to replace the older label dementia praecox?
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia was one of several lasting words Bleuler coined, along with schizoid, depth psychology and ambivalence.
Q 26Which German psychiatrist's study of asylum patient Auguste Deter described the dementia that now bears his name?
Alois Alzheimer
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.
Q 27Which French physician, appointed to Paris's Bicêtre Hospital in 1793, worked to end the chaining of asylum patients?
Philippe Pinel
Philippe Pinel learned his humane methods from Jean-Baptiste Pussin, the hospital's unschooled custodian, to whom he virtually apprenticed himself.
Q 28Which eating disorder was named in 1873 by Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria's personal physicians?
Anorexia nervosa
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.
Q 29Which condition did Johns Hopkins child psychiatrist Leo Kanner describe in a landmark 1943 study of eleven children?
Autism
Autism, in Kanner's account, showed in children with a strong wish to be alone and an insistence that routines stay the same.
Q 30Johann Christian Reil coined the word psychiatry in 1808 from Greek roots meaning the medical treatment of what?
The soul
The soul, psykhe in Greek, supplies the first half of the word; Reil, a German physician, joined it to a root meaning 'to heal'.