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.
Early in his academic career, he thus came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for the lack of progress in psychiatric research could be – although worked out with good intention – the anosological diagnostic methodology carried out through expert consensus.
Helmut Beckmann proposed to go back on the painstaking road of psychopathological differentiation in order to obtain the most homogeneous groups for investigation, thus enabling sophisticated modern biomedical techniques to bring more certainty to the field.
In a series of reports, he and his co-workers pinpointed the nosological autonomy of cycloid psychoses, unsystematic and systematic schizophrenias by inter-rater reliability analysis and long-term follow-up studies.
This resulted in a profound progress towards an etiological differentiation of the catatonic psychoses, which finally demonstrated a confirmed and significant linkage of periodic catatonia to chromosome 15q15, despite considerable genetic heterogeneity.
In the light of these findings, the spectrum of 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.
In the same year, he moved to the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim (Head H. Häfner), where he was appointed Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Heidelberg in 1978 and Vice-Director in 1983.