The Performance of Manic Patients on the ‘Grid Test for Schizophrenic Thought Disorder’

Abstract

It can be difficult to make a confident diagnosis and one that will stand the test of time when a person without a family history or previous history of psychosis presents as psychotic with overactivity, pressure of talk, loose association of ideas and perhaps some paranoid ideation. He may be schizophrenic or manic. The nature of the disturbance of speech, and by inference thought, may assist in making the clinical diagnosis, but standard textbooks (Slater and Roth, 1969; Freedman and Kaplan, 1967) state that pressure of speech, flight of ideas, clang associations, distractibility and inability to adhere to a line of thought are common to both conditions.