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On a Specific Psychotic Reaction of Schizophrenics to Physical Illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

R. E. Hemphill
Affiliation:
Bristol City and County Mental Hospital
E. Stengel
Affiliation:
Bristol City and County Mental Hospital
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The way in which schizophrenics react to physical illness and injury is a problem worthy of study, especially at the present time when schizophrenia is being so widely treated by methods which bring about profound changes of the physical state. Although schizophrenics, recent and chronic, are very susceptible to physical illness and form a considerable part of the sick population of the average mental hospital, this question has not attracted a great measure of attention. A survey of the schizophrenic population of a mental hospital suggests that there is an apparent lack of specific psychotic reactions to physical illness, so that it would seem as if schizophrenics react to physical illness either in a normal way or more commonly with indifference. It is true that certain paranoid patients include complaints of physical disturbances in their systems of delusions, but as a rule, even in these cases, there is no specific reaction to physical illness, which like other experiences enters into the world of imagination in which the patient exists.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1940 

References

1 Head, and Holmes, (1911-12), Brain, 34, 134.Google Scholar
2 Bleuler, (1911), Dementia Praecox. Leipzig, Vienna.Google Scholar
3 Hemphill, (1939), Journ. Ment. Sci., 85, 119.Google Scholar
4 Stengel, (1933), Arch. f. Psychiat., 101, 565.Google Scholar
5 Schilder, (1919), Seur. Zbl., quoted in (5).Google Scholar
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