High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dementia praecox ("premature dementia") refers to a chronic, deteriorating psychotic disorder characterized by rapid cognitive disintegration, usually beginning in the late teens or early adulthood. It is a term first used in 1891 in this Latin form by Arnold Pick (1851-1924), a professor of psychiatry at the German branch of Charles University in Prague. His brief clinical report described the case of a person with a psychotic disorder resembling hebephrenia (see below). It was popularized by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) in 1896 in his first detailed description of a condition that would eventually be reframed and relabeled as schizophrenia.