Non‐regressive schizophrenia

Abstract

Two series of first adissions ‐ mental hospital patients from the years 1964–67 ‐ have been followed up after 5–8 year with regard to social prognosis, and (in male index cases) heredity. One group was, according to case records of the first stay, diagnosed as surfering from classical, regressive schizophrenia (n= 56), with all seemingly atypical cases excluded. A second group (n= 54) had exhibited the picture of non‐regressive (pseudoneurotic) schizophrenia.A detailed account of the syptomatology of non‐regressive schizophrenia is presented, with special emphasis laid on the phenomenon of paraoxysmal or enduring, increased perceptual intensity, or dishabituation of various modalities of subjective experience, incluiding audition, smell, exprience of cutaneous pressure, motor feedback, vision, and stream of thought. No signs of objecttive motor disturbance or of regressive congnitive functioning (dominance of primary process, predicative and autistic thinking, condensation) and other schizopohrenic signs among those given by Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Schenider were present during the first stay in these states.Comparisons between the two groups have similar distribution as to age at first admission, sex, and social functioning at follow‐up. Marriage rate for each sex and fertility were similarly low. The age‐corrected incidence of regressive schizophrenia among first degree relatives of the male non‐regressive index cases (n= 32) was 1.6% (parents) and 8.3% (sibs), all secondary cases of mental disease (n= 6) having fallen ill before the adission of the respective index cases. No first degree relatives of the regressive schizophrenic index cases had been treated for mental illness. Therefore, possible sources of threshold and diagnostic bias are discussed. Relatives of an extended group (n= 87) of regressive schizophrenia during the same sampling period showed the risk figures 1.8% (parents) and 50% (sibs).The similarity of age and sex distributions, and of social prognosis in classical schizophrenic cases as compared with non‐regressive ones from a parallel series, as well as the hereditary pattern of the non‐regressive males are taken as indicants of a nosological identity between the two diagnostic groups, in spite of thier differing clinical pictures during their initial hospital stays.