Helmut Beckmann

Professor Helmut Beckmann (22 May 1940 – 3 September 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 genetic, somatic and psychosocial origins. Provided by Wikipedia