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The category of an "Early Psychosis" refers to a common medical classification. It is an essential part of the knowledge constituting mental health even as it represents a normative category subsuming a set of peculiarities in human behaviour, speech, emotional expression, and mental states that together can be described as a mental disorder. Numerous publications since the 1990s have rendered the "Early Psychosis" into a focus of standardised research, prevention and therapy procedures, while earlier medical practices remained unknown. Relying mainly on the archives of the Hospital of Bonneval, France, we draw comparisons with other French and German hospitals through the use of clinical records with a focus on the period 1950-1980. We then analyze the linkages between certificates, first clinical interviews, anamnesis, emergence of a diagnosis, treatment indications, prognosis, and the like, which together constitute a complex of diachronic measurements that offer potential insights upon the nature of medical knowledge and practice. Our interest is less the evaluation of consequences of specific doctrines than the investigation of the clinical parameters and conceptual dichotomies upon which practitioners relied. We conclude that the clinic is established not just out of objective signs, but that subjective symptoms are also part of psychiatric health practices, which in turn become a normative category that included a grey area between atypical behaviour and a selective diagnosis in, for example, the case of schizophrenia.