Helmut Beckmann
Encyclopedia
Professor Helmut Beckmann (May 22, 1940 – September 3, 2006) was a German psychiatrist
. He was one of the founders of neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia
and biologically based psychiatry
in Germany
.
Beckmann's major scientific interests were psychopharmacology
, neuropathology
of endogenous psychoses, and differentiated psychopathology
, in the tradition of Carl Wernicke, Karl Kleist
and Karl Leonhard
.
He continuously insisted and claimed that psychoses with schizophrenic and schizophrenia-like symptoms did not appear to be a continuum of disorders, but seemed rather to consist of different, clinically sharply distinguished subgroups with different gene
tic, somatic
and psychosocial origins.
In 1989, he was co-founder of the International Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard Society (WKL), appointed as president and confirmed in this position until his death.
Helmut Beckmann’s publications include more than 350 papers, books and new editions of Leonhard’s textbooks.
He received the Kurt Schneider
Prize for his twin studies together with E. Franzek.
He served on the Editorial Board of many psychiatric journals, including Psychopathology, Journal of Neural Transmission, Biological Psychiatry, and World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.
Helmut Beckmann became acquainted with K. Leonhard’s work through his doctoral advisor H. Dietrich, Munich, very early in his professional career.
Early in his academic career, he thus came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for the lack of progress in psychiatric research could be – although worked out with good intention – the anosological diagnostic methodology carried out through expert consensus. On his appointment to Würzburg
he invited K. Leonhard for lectures and visited him several times in the former Eastern part of Germany absorbing his outstanding knowledge on endogenous psychoses.
Inspired by him, he contrasted the anosological approach with a classification of the endogenous psychoses based on a clinical-empirical approach derived from lifelong observations of the patients in highly differentiated descriptions.
He insisted that a certain diagnosis can be provided only when all the characteristic symptoms of a clinical picture are clearly present.
In a series of reports, he and his co-workers pinpointed the nosological autonomy of cycloid psychoses, unsystematic and systematic schizophrenias by inter-rater reliability analysis and long-term follow-up studies.
He emphasized that the phenomenon of birth seasonality is confined to an excess of winter and spring births in cycloid psychoses and systematic schizophrenias (both groups with low familial loading of psychosis).
Subsequent studies on maternal recall of gestational infections documented a direct relationship between flu-like and febrile affections in the first trimester of maternal gestation with the later occurrence of cycloid psychoses and second trimester affections with manifestations of systematic schizophrenias.
The autonomy of the cycloid psychoses was substantiated by neurophysiological and morphometric studies. In a systematic twin
study, he provided evidence that in cycloid psychosis monozygotic pairs had similar concordance
rates to dizygotic pairs, pointing to a low heritability. These findings were confirmed by a controlled family study, where first-degree relatives of patients with cycloid psychoses were found to show a similar low frequency of secondary cases to relatives of a population-based control sample.
In 1986 with C. Jakob, he reported on cortical and subcortical developmental disturbances in schizophrenic psychoses, particularly in the entorhinal area.
These cytoarchitectural abnormalities were mainly or exclusively localized in the upper cortical layers of the limbic allocortex
, including circumscribed malformations, nerve cell alterations as well as cytoarchitectural deviations attributable to disruptions of neural migration in the second trimester of gestation.
This resulted in a profound progress towards an etiological differentiation of the catatonic psychoses, which finally demonstrated a confirmed and significant linkage of periodic catatonia
to chromosome 15q15, despite considerable genetic heterogeneity.
In the light of these findings, the spectrum of psychoses with schizophrenic and schizophrenia-like symptoms did not appear to be a continuum of disorders, but seemed rather to consist of different, clinically sharply distinguished subgroups with different genetic, somatic and psychosocial origins.
Although his findings were not readily accepted, he always hoped that reservations about a nosological differentiation of endogenous psychoses would one day give way to a fruitful discussion of its findings and implications.
In Helmut Beckmann, the psychiatric community loses a person who translated brilliant ideas into practical research to advance scientific and clinical knowledge on the etiology of mental disorders and treatment of patients with mental disorders.
, Düsseldorf
, Heidelberg
and Munich, he trained in psychiatry at the Psychiatric District Hospital of Haar/Munich and moved to the Department of Psychiatry, University of Munich, as research assistant in 1971.
Under the aegis of H. Hippius and N. Matussek, he was involved in clinical and biochemical studies in the emerging field of psychopharmacology, including a research fellowship at F.K. Goodwin’s group at the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), Bethesda, MD, USA.
In 1978, he received an appointment as university lecturer in ‘Clinical Psychiatry’ at the University of Munich [‘Habilitation’]. In the same year, he moved to the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim (Head H. Häfner), where he was appointed Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Heidelberg in 1978 and Vice-Director in 1983.
Two years later, in 1985, he became head of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Würzburg
, a position he held until his retirement in May, 2006.
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...
. He was one of the founders of neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
and biologically based psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
Beckmann's major scientific interests were psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology is the scientific study of the actions of drugs and their effects on mood, sensation, thinking, and behavior...
, neuropathology
Neuropathology
Neuropathology is the study of disease of nervous system tissue, usually in the form of either small surgical biopsies or whole autopsy brains. Neuropathology is a subspecialty of anatomic pathology, neurology, and neurosurgery...
of endogenous psychoses, and differentiated psychopathology
Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...
, in the tradition of Carl Wernicke, Karl Kleist
Karl Kleist
Karl Kleist was a German neurologist and psychiatrist who made notable advances in descriptive psychopathology and neuropsychology. His work links to that of Carl Wernicke and Karl Leonhard. Kleist coined the terms unipolar and bipolar that are now used in the concepts of Unipolar depression and...
and Karl Leonhard
Karl Leonhard
Karl Leonhard was a German psychiatrist, who stood in the tradition of Carl Wernicke and Karl Kleist. He created a complex classification of psychotic illnesses called nosological.His work covered Psychology, Psychotherapy, Biological psychiatry and Biological psychology...
.
He continuously insisted and claimed that psychoses with schizophrenic and schizophrenia-like symptoms did not appear to be a continuum of disorders, but seemed rather to consist of different, clinically sharply distinguished subgroups with different gene
Gene
A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains...
tic, somatic
Somatic
The term somatic means 'of the body',, relating to the body. In medicine, somatic illness is bodily, not mental, illness. The term is often used in biology to refer to the cells of the body in contrast to the germ line cells which usually give rise to the gametes...
and psychosocial origins.
Professional engagement
In 1979, Helmut Beckmann was a Constitutional Committee Member of the German Society of Biological Psychiatry, became President in 1987–1990, and was an Honorary Fellow from 2000. He served as treasurer of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) from 1991 to 1997, and as President of Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum (CINP) from 1998 to 2000.In 1989, he was co-founder of the International Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard Society (WKL), appointed as president and confirmed in this position until his death.
Helmut Beckmann’s publications include more than 350 papers, books and new editions of Leonhard’s textbooks.
He received the Kurt Schneider
Kurt Schneider
Kurt Schneider was a German psychiatrist known largely for his writing on the diagnosis and understanding of schizophrenia.-Biography:...
Prize for his twin studies together with E. Franzek.
He served on the Editorial Board of many psychiatric journals, including Psychopathology, Journal of Neural Transmission, Biological Psychiatry, and World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.
Clinical work and contribution to psychodiagnostics and psychopathology
Helmut Beckmann trained a generation of psychiatrists in evidence-based treatment and psychopathology, and thus promoted a generation of academics, many of whom are leaders in the field today.Helmut Beckmann became acquainted with K. Leonhard’s work through his doctoral advisor H. Dietrich, Munich, very early in his professional career.
Early in his academic career, he thus came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for the lack of progress in psychiatric research could be – although worked out with good intention – the anosological diagnostic methodology carried out through expert consensus. On his appointment to Würzburg
Würzburg
Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....
he invited K. Leonhard for lectures and visited him several times in the former Eastern part of Germany absorbing his outstanding knowledge on endogenous psychoses.
Inspired by him, he contrasted the anosological approach with a classification of the endogenous psychoses based on a clinical-empirical approach derived from lifelong observations of the patients in highly differentiated descriptions.
He insisted that a certain diagnosis can be provided only when all the characteristic symptoms of a clinical picture are clearly present.
Re-classification of psychoses and environmental factors in the etiology of schizophrenia syndrome
Helmut Beckmann proposed to go back on the painstaking road of psychopathological differentiation in order to obtain the most homogeneous groups for investigation, thus enabling sophisticated modern biomedical techniques to bring more certainty to the field.In a series of reports, he and his co-workers pinpointed the nosological autonomy of cycloid psychoses, unsystematic and systematic schizophrenias by inter-rater reliability analysis and long-term follow-up studies.
He emphasized that the phenomenon of birth seasonality is confined to an excess of winter and spring births in cycloid psychoses and systematic schizophrenias (both groups with low familial loading of psychosis).
Subsequent studies on maternal recall of gestational infections documented a direct relationship between flu-like and febrile affections in the first trimester of maternal gestation with the later occurrence of cycloid psychoses and second trimester affections with manifestations of systematic schizophrenias.
The autonomy of the cycloid psychoses was substantiated by neurophysiological and morphometric studies. In a systematic twin
Twin
A twin is one of two offspring produced in the same pregnancy. Twins can either be monozygotic , meaning that they develop from one zygote that splits and forms two embryos, or dizygotic because they develop from two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm.In contrast, a fetus...
study, he provided evidence that in cycloid psychosis monozygotic pairs had similar concordance
Concordance
Concordance can mean:* Concordance , a list of words used in a body of work, with their immediate contexts* Concordance , the presence of the same trait in both members of a pair of twins...
rates to dizygotic pairs, pointing to a low heritability. These findings were confirmed by a controlled family study, where first-degree relatives of patients with cycloid psychoses were found to show a similar low frequency of secondary cases to relatives of a population-based control sample.
Neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia
Driven by his pioneering neuropathological findings of early prenatal cytoarchitectural malformations in the brains of patients with schizophrenic psychoses, he is one of the fathers of the neurodevelopmental theory of these psychoses.In 1986 with C. Jakob, he reported on cortical and subcortical developmental disturbances in schizophrenic psychoses, particularly in the entorhinal area.
These cytoarchitectural abnormalities were mainly or exclusively localized in the upper cortical layers of the limbic allocortex
Allocortex
The allocortex is a part of the cerebral cortex characterized by fewer cell layers than the neocortex The allocortex (also known as heterogenetic cortex) is a part of the cerebral cortex characterized by fewer cell layers than the neocortex The allocortex (also known as heterogenetic cortex) is a...
, including circumscribed malformations, nerve cell alterations as well as cytoarchitectural deviations attributable to disruptions of neural migration in the second trimester of gestation.
Psychomotor psychoses
Clinically, his major affinity was to the psychomotor psychoses. His examinations were based on the profound knowledge of his predecessors, and he taught us to meticulously observe the clinical pictures.This resulted in a profound progress towards an etiological differentiation of the catatonic psychoses, which finally demonstrated a confirmed and significant linkage of periodic catatonia
Catatonia
Catatonia is a state of neurogenic motor immobility, and behavioral abnormality manifested by stupor. It was first described in 1874: Die Katatonie oder das Spannungsirresein ....
to chromosome 15q15, despite considerable genetic heterogeneity.
In the light of these findings, the spectrum of psychoses with schizophrenic and schizophrenia-like symptoms did not appear to be a continuum of disorders, but seemed rather to consist of different, clinically sharply distinguished subgroups with different genetic, somatic and psychosocial origins.
Although his findings were not readily accepted, he always hoped that reservations about a nosological differentiation of endogenous psychoses would one day give way to a fruitful discussion of its findings and implications.
In Helmut Beckmann, the psychiatric community loses a person who translated brilliant ideas into practical research to advance scientific and clinical knowledge on the etiology of mental disorders and treatment of patients with mental disorders.
Education and work
After the study of medicine in CologneCologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
, Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
and Munich, he trained in psychiatry at the Psychiatric District Hospital of Haar/Munich and moved to the Department of Psychiatry, University of Munich, as research assistant in 1971.
Under the aegis of H. Hippius and N. Matussek, he was involved in clinical and biochemical studies in the emerging field of psychopharmacology, including a research fellowship at F.K. Goodwin’s group at the National Institute of Mental Health
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health...
(NIMH), Bethesda, MD, USA.
In 1978, he received an appointment as university lecturer in ‘Clinical Psychiatry’ at the University of Munich [‘Habilitation’]. In the same year, he moved to the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim (Head H. Häfner), where he was appointed Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Heidelberg in 1978 and Vice-Director in 1983.
Two years later, in 1985, he became head of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Würzburg
University of Würzburg
The University of Würzburg is a university in Würzburg, Germany, founded in 1402. The university is a member of the distinguished Coimbra Group.-Name:...
, a position he held until his retirement in May, 2006.