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A small mirage on the road, Western plains, New South Wales, Australia

Los llanos, an area of land with relatively high relief in Venezuela

Corn fields in the Wallachian Plain. The Walachian plain is known for his thick deposits of loess and its fertile black earth

Part of the plain that surrounds Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia

In geography, a plain is land with relatively low relief, that is flat or gently rolling. Prairies and steppes are types of plains, and the archetype for a plain is often thought of as a grassland, but plains in their natural state may also be covered in shrublands, woodland and forest, or vegetation may be absent in the case of sandy or stony plains in hot deserts. Types of flatlands for which the term is not generally used include those covered entirely and permanently by swamps, marshes, playas, or ice sheets.

Plains occur as lowlands and at the bottoms of valleys but also on plateaus at high elevations. In a valley, a plain is enclosed on two sides but in other cases a plain may be delineated by a complete or partial ring of hills, by mountains or cliffs. Where a geological region contains more than one plain, they may be connected by a pass (sometime termed a gap). Plains may have been formed from flowing lava, deposited by water, ice or wind, or formed by erosion by these agents from hills and \bro Plains in many areas are important for nc because where the soils were deposited as sediments they may be deep and fertile, and the flatness facilitates mechanization of crop production; or because they support grasslands which provide good grazing for livestock.

Types of terrestrial plains[link]

• Coastal plain, an area of low-lying land adjacent to a sea; the term is used especially where they contrast with hills, mountains or plateau further inland.
• Alluvial plains are formed by rivers, and may be one of these overlapping types:
  • Flood plain, adjacent to a stream, river, lake or wetland that experiences occasional or periodic flooding.
  • Alluvial plain, formed over a long period of time by a river depositing sediment on its floodplain or bed which becomes alluvial soil. The difference between a floodplain and an alluvial plain is that the floodplain represents the area experiencing flooding fairly regularly in the present or recently, whereas an alluvial plain includes areas where the floodplain is now and used to be, or areas which only experience flooding a few times a century.
  • Scroll plain, a plain through which a river meanders with a very low gradient.
• Lacustrine plain, a plain that originally formed in a lacustrine environment, that is, as the bed of a lake.
• Lava plain, formed by sheets of flowing lava.
• Glacial plains are formed by the movement of glaciers under the force of gravity:
  • Till plain, a plain of glacial till that forms when a sheet of ice becomes detached from the main body of a glacier and melts in place depositing the sediments it carries. Till plains are composed of unsorted material (till) of all sizes.
  • Sandur (plural sandar), a glacial out-wash plain formed of sediments deposited by melt-water at the terminus of a glacier. Sandar consist mainly of stratified (layered and sorted) gravel and sand

Other types[link]

The term may also be used for flat areas of the ocean floor or for flat areas on moons and planets.

• Abyssal plain, a flat or very gently sloping area of the deep ocean basin

See also[link]

Look up plain in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Plains

Geography portal

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• Flooded grasslands and savannas
• Flood-meadow
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• Water-meadow
• Wet meadow

References[link]

Kurt Schneider (7 January 1887 – 27 October 1967) was a German psychiatrist known largely for his writing on the diagnosis and understanding of schizophrenia, as well as personality disorders then known as psychopathic personalities.

Biography[link]

Schneider was born in Crailsheim, Kingdom of Württemberg, and trained in medicine in Berlin and Tübingen. He was drafted for and completed military service in World War I and later obtained a postgraduate qualification in psychiatry. In 1931 he became director of the German Psychiatric Research Institute in Munich, which was previously founded by Emil Kraepelin.

Disgusted by the developing tide of psychiatric eugenics championed by the Nazi Party, Schneider left the institute (when?) and served as an army doctor (for who?) during World War II. After the war, anti-Nazi academics were appointed to serve in, and rebuild Germany's medical institutions and Schneider was given the post of Dean of the Medical School at Heidelberg University. Schneider kept this post until his retirement in 1955.

Contributions to psychiatry[link]

Schneider was concerned with improving the method of diagnosis in psychiatry. He contributed to diagnostic procedures and the definition of disorders in the following areas of psychiatry:

Mood disorders[link]

Schneider coined the terms endogenous depression, derived from Emil Kraepelin's use of the adjective to mean biological in origin, and reactive depression, more usually seen in outpatients, in 1920.^[1]

Psychosis[link]

Like Karl Jaspers, he particularly championed diagnoses based on the form, rather than the content of a sign or symptom. For example, he argued that a delusion should not be diagnosed by the content of the belief, but by the way in which a belief is held.

He was also concerned with differentiating schizophrenia from other forms of psychosis, by listing the psychotic symptoms that are particularly characteristic of schizophrenia. These have become known as Schneiderian First-Rank Symptoms or simply, first-rank symptoms.^[2]

First-Rank Symptoms in schizophrenia[link]

• Audible thoughts (thought echo)
• Voices heard arguing
• Voices heard commenting on one's actions
• Somatic/thought passivity experiences (delusions of control)
• Thought withdrawal
• Thought insertion - Thoughts are ascribed to other people who intrude their thoughts upon the patient
• Thought broadcasting (also called thought diffusion)
• Delusional perception (i.e. taking a normal sensory perception to mean a bizarre situation such as taking seeing an aeroplane as indicating the patient should be the next president)

The reliability of using first-rank symptoms for the diagnosis of schizophrenia has since been questioned,^[3] although the terms might still be used descriptively by mental health professionals who do not use them as diagnostic aids.

A memory device that is frequently used to remember the first rank symptoms is ABCD: Auditory hallucinations, Broadcasting of thought, Controlled thought (delusions of control), Delusional perception.

Psychopathic personalities[link]

Schneider also played a key role in developing concepts of psychopathy, used in a broad sense to mean personality disorder or particularly antisocial personality disorder. He published the influential 'The Psychopathic Personalities' in 1923. This was based in part on his earlier 1921 work 'The Personality and Fate of Registered Prostitutes' where he outlined 12 character types.

Schneider sought to put psychopathy diagnoses on a morally neutral and scientific footing. He defined abnormal personality as a statistical deviation from the norm, vaguely conceptualised. He thought very creative or intelligent people had abnormal personalities by definition, but defined the psychopathic personality as those who suffered from their abnormal personality or caused suffering to society because of it. He did not see these as mental illnesses as such - thus adding to a divide, contrary to Eugene Bleuler for example, between those considered psychotic and those considered psychopathic.

Schneider's unsystematic typology was based on his clinical views. He proposed 10 psychopathic personalities: those showing abnormal mood/activity; the insecure sensitive and insecure anankastic (drifting, feckless); fanatics; self-assertive; emotionally unstable; explosive; callous; weak-willed; asthenic.

Schneider's work in this respect is said to have influenced all future descriptive typologies, including the current classifications of personality disorders in the DSM-IV and ICD-10. Nevertheless, Schneider is considered to not exactly have succeeded in his attempted and claimed production of a value-free non-judgemental diagnostic system.^[4] In fact, Schneider's mixing of the medical and the moral has been described as the most noteworthy aspect of this work, which has been linked back to German reception of Cesare Lombroso's theory of the 'born criminal', redefined by Emil Kraepelin and others (see also Koch) in to psychiatric terms as a 'moral defect'. After World War I it lived on in Schneider's 'gemutolos' (compassionless) psychopaths, or what Karl Birnbaum called 'amoral' psychopaths. It has been described as remarkable that Schneider criticized Kraepelin and others for basing their personality diagnoses on moral judgements, yet appeared to do so himself. For example, Schneider admitted that the 'suffering of society' was a 'totally subjective' and 'teleological’ criterion for defining psychopathic personalities, but said that in 'scientific studies' this could be avoided by operating by the broader statistical category of abnormal personalities, which he believed were always congenital and therefore largely hereditary. The attempt to finesse the problem of value judgments has been described as 'clearly unsatisfactory'.^[5]

See also[link]

• Karl Jaspers
• Schizophrenia

References[link]

1. ^ Schneider, Kurt (1920). "Die Schichtung des emotionalen Lebens und der Aufbau der Depressionszustände". Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 59: 281–86. DOI:10.1007/BF02901090. 
2. ^ Schneider, K. Clinical Psychopathology. New York: Grune and Stratton. 1959.
3. ^ Bertelsen A (2002). "Schizophrenia and related disorders: experience with current diagnostic systems". Psychopathology 35 (2–3): 89–93. DOI:10.1159/000065125. PMID 12145490. 
4. ^ Henning Sass & Alan Felthous (2008) Chapter 1: History and Conceptual Development of Psychopathic Disorders in International Handbook on Psychopathic Disorders and the Law. Edited by Alan Felthous, Henning Sass
5. ^ Richard F. Wetzell (2000) Inventing the criminal: a history of German criminology, 1880-1945 pg 148 & 297