Early Childhood Catatonia

Abstract

The special form of schizophrenia found in early childhood has not been described in previous editions of this book. The main reason for this is that in the course of my psychiatric activities I seldom saw severe cases of mental retardation from which I could obtain useful information. I did become acquainted with early childhood schizophrenia and as mentioned above have described it, but I thought that such cases were very rare, and fundamentally could not at all be separated from later childhood schizophrenia. I did not know that among the supposed severely retarded children there might be many early childhood schizophrenics. As I came across such cases I started to recognize their independent significance after the thought had occurred to me that I should be looking in departments of child psychiatry among mentally retarded patients for patients with schizophrenia, not of early childhood cases but throughout childhood. I thought I would discover at the most one or two cases, in fact I saw very few schizophrenics who had become ill in later childhood; in reality I found many cases which had begun in early childhood and thus got to know the great significance of this clinical picture.