Timeline of psychiatry

This is a timeline of psychiatry.

Big picture

Time period	Development summary
<18 century	Until the 18th century, mental illness is most often seen as demonic possession. However, it gradually comes to be considered as a sickness requiring treatment. Many judge that modern psychiatry is born with the efforts of French physician Philippe Pinel in the late century.
19th century	"Psychiatry got its name as a medical specialty in the early 1800s. For the first century of its existence, the field concerned itself with severely disordered individuals confined to asylums or hospitals. These patients were generally psychotic, severely depressed or manic, or suffered conditions we would now recognize as medical: dementia, brain tumors, seizures, hypothyroidism, etc. " Research and teaching in psychiatry are dominated by the Germans for 100 years, until 1933.
20th century	Around the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud publishes theories on the unconscious roots of some of these less severe disorders, which he terms psycho-neuroses. Psychoanalysis is the dominant paradigm in outpatient psychiatry for the first half of the century. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, new medications begin to change the face of psychiatry.
21st century	Pharmaceutical innovation dries up in the 2000s, with no new classes of medication or blockbuster psychiatric drugs being discovered.

Full timeline

Year	Event type	Details	Location
1816		Johann Reil coins the word "psychiatry".
1952		Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
1987		Prozac is released.
1990s		The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health declares the 1990s the Decade of the Brain "to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research."	United States

Meta information on the timeline

How the timeline was built

The initial version of the timeline was written by FIXME.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

Feedback and comments

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