Syphilis and psychiatry at the Mysore Government Mental Hospital (NIMHANS) in the early 20^thcentury

Mental health progress requires causal diagnostic nosology and scalable causal discovery

“…The formalized uncoupling of causation from psychiatric diagnostic nosology, which began in 1980, is further exacerbated by a much longer insidious practice in the field to exclude disorders from the field’s domain of responsibility once their etiologies become established . A notable example of this practice concerned the syndrome of mood, anxiety, and psychotic symptoms, accompanied by a host of somatic symptoms, known as “General Paralysis of the Insane” that was diagnosed in approximately one third of patients hospitalized with a mental illness in 1913: when it was discovered that the brains of these patients were infected with Treponema pallidum , revealing the treatable condition known as neurosyphilis ( 36 , 37 ). With such an etiology discovered, this disorder was renamed and was transferred to the responsibility of the fields of neurology and infectious disease!…”