Jacob Kasanin (1897–1946) and Schizoaffective Disorder

Abstract

Jacob Kasanin was born in Slavgorod, USSR, in 1897. He migrated to the USA in 1915 and graduated from the University of Michigan with an M.D. in 1921 and an M.S. in Public Health in 1926. He served as Senior Research Associate at Boston Psychopathic Hospital and as the Director of the Department of Mental Hygiene of the Federated Jewish Charities in Boston. One of his research interests was the study of the functional psychoses in children. In 1931, he became the Clinical Director of the Rhode Island State Hospital where he was supported by a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study schizophrenia. He published his famous paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1933 titled “The Acute Schizoaffective Psychoses,” after reading it at the 88th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia, PA, in May/June of 1932. He later became the Director of the Depart­ment of Psychiatry at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago from 1936 to 1939. The importance of this new diagnosis was that it rejoined schizophrenia and bipolar disorder after almost a half century of separateness.