Accurate diagnosis of psychotic disorders may be very difficult in youth with intellectual disabilities. The authors reviewed the assessment, treatment and follow-up of 21 youths with ID referred because of early onset of psychotic symptoms. Just over one half of the patients had a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. One third…

The Arabic Scale of Death anxiety (ASDA), the Death Depression Scale (DDS), and the Death Obsession Scale (DOS) were administered, individually, to 7 groups (n = 765) of Egyptian normal participants (non-clinical), anxiety disorder patients, patients suffering from schizophrenia (males and females), and addicts (males only). They were generally…

Objective: To examine whether first-episode psychosis patients with onset during adolescence (ages 15-18) differ significantly from those with young-adult onset (ages 19-30). Method: Consecutive patients presenting with first-episode psychosis (N = 242) were assessed for demographic and illness characteristics such as duration of untreated…

Objective: Weight gain is a serious side effect of atypical antipsychotics, especially in childhood. In this study, the authors examined six weight gain-related hormones in patients with childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) after 6 weeks of clozapine treatment. Method: Fasting serum samples for 24 patients with COS and 21 matched healthy controls…

A meta-analysis was conducted on all studies of suicide mortality in follow-up studies of schizophrenic patients that presented data for male and female patients separately. The percentage of deaths from suicide was significantly greater for the male schizophrenic patients than for the female schizophrenic patients in studies where both sexes were…

Some researchers have attempted to connect suicide to a general history of mental illness; others have searched for diagnosis-free suicide risk factors; and still others have argued that different risk profiles may emerge for different diagnoses. In addition to these issues, it appears that suicide completers and suicide attempters show somewhat…

The relation between intelligence at admission and subsequent rehospitalization was examined in 91 schizophrenic males. (Editor)

Desensitization or assertive training or both were applied to hospitalized schizophrenics who displayed phobias, lack of interpersonal assertiveness, or both. In none of the patients did desensitization produce any reduction of avoidance of the feared object. The assertive training produces minimal improvement in two patients. (Author)

Overweight patients on a token economy psychiatric ward were reinforced with tokens, off ward privileges and social approval for meeting a weight loss criterion of three pounds per week. The progress of two subjects, both chronic paranoid schizophrenics, is described. The procedure appears to be effective. (Author)

Analysis of the pairwise preferences of pairs of gambling stimuli elicited from each of 40 chronic schizophrenic inpatients, 32 schizophrenic outpatients, and 33 siblings or parents of these patients indicates that choice behavior was usually determined by the expected value of the stimuli, with no significant differences among groups. (SLD)

A sample of prominent psychotherapists were asked to fill out the A-B therapist "type" scale and comment on their possible differential effectiveness in treating schizoid/schizophrenic versus neurotic patients. The data suggest that B therapists desire and seek more complex and exciting sensory-cognitive inputs during therapy hours than A…

Three aspects of Rosenhan's diagnostic challenge presented in "On Being Sane in Insane Places" (AA 521 951) were commented on: (a) the concept of sanity-insanity, (b) the ethics of research involving simulation, and (c) the mileau of the therapeutic community. (Author/RK)

Research supported by a National Institute of Mental Health predoctoral research fellowship (1-F1-MH-36960-01).

Study partially supported by a summer Fellowship from the University of Kentucky Research Foundation.

This investigation tested the validity of Loren Chapman's thoery of schizophrenic thought disorder. The vocabulary test from the Shipley-Hartford Scale served as the control task, and the multiple-choice vocabulary test used by Boland and Chapman to disclose a schizophrenic deficit related to thought disorder served as the experimental task.…