The incidence of psychoses and other mental abnormalities in the families of recovered and deteriorated schizophrenic patients

Summary

A comparison of the familial abnormalities in two comparable groups of 50 recovered and 50 deteriorated schizophrenic patients, exhibiting initially similar clinical pictures, gave the following results:

• 1. The incidence of familial functional psychoses is 40 per cent in both of these groups combined, 44 per cent in the recovered group, and 36 per cent in the deteriorated group.

• 2. The porportion between familial manic-depressive disease and schizophrenia is nearly five to one in the recovered and approximately the reverse, one to five, in the deteriorated group. Corresponding are the figures concerning the prognostic outcome of these psychoses.

• 3. The distribution among the different degrees of familial relationship confirms the generally accepted dominance of manic-depressive disease and the more frequent appearance of schizophrenia in the collateral lines.

• 4. The highest incidence of familial schizophrenia occurs among the catatonics of the deteriorated group, while there is no schizophrenic taint among the relatives of the “revised” group of recovered catatonic patients.

• 5. None of the manic-depressive patients among the relatives of the recovered group actually belong to the manic-depressive nucleus.

• 6. Among the manic-depressive relatives of the recovered group, there are several whose clinical pictures remind one strongly of the corresponding atypical types in the recovered schizophrenic group.