No abstract

Data collected from a survey of treatment foster-care programs permitted an exploratory study of relationships among type of discharge (planned or unplanned), restrictiveness of postdischarge living arrangements, and the program characteristics (per client annual cost, basis of payments and amount paid to family care providers, preservice and inservice training requirements for family care providers, maximum caseload permitted for social workers, program treatment theory, program size, maximum number of placements permitted per family care provider, and the average number of clients per home). Data were available for 1,521 youth discharged from 210 treatment foster-care programs in the United States and Canada. Of the total discharges, 60% were planned, and 63% of the youth were discharged to settings less restrictive than treatment foster care. No meaningful associations were found between program characteristics and type of discharge or restrictiveness of discharge setting. Additional research is necessary to establish the relationship, if any, between program characteristics and program success before moving to impose standards that may increase the cost of delivering treatment foster care but not increase program success.

Low speed, or retardation of motor, perceptual and cognitive functioning has been considered to be an important aspect of depressive illness, particularly in the form described as psychotic depression (10,11,22,24,26,29,30,32). However negative findings have also been reported. Thus, Hall and Stride (17) failed to find a difference in reaction times between depressive and normal controls. Friedman (12) found only a minimal effect of severe depression on cognitive functioning. Both Hall and Stride and also Friedman stressed the importance of matching the subjects for age and education, which had not been done in many previous studies. Age is a particularly important variable in relation to the speed of perception and more complex information processing (1,8,16,27). Friedman matched his depressed and nondepressed subjects carefully for age and education and administered to them a large battery of cognitive, perceptual and psychomotor tests. He found that although depressed patients subjectively assessed their performance as being very poor they were significantly impaired on only nine test scores out of eighty-two and only on three scores at the .01 level of significance. However he did not attempt to separate speed tests from power (level) tests. There is ample evidence that the power (level) factors of cognitive functioning are relatively independent of the speed factors (4,14,18,19,24,25,26). The perusal of Friedman's results suggests that most of the tests on which

An experiment was conducted to determine how warmth detection thresholds (WDTs), pain thresholds (PTs) and pain tolerance thresholds (PTOs) to radiant heat differed between groups of process schizophrenics (G-i), reactive schizophrenics (Gs), nonschizophrenic (G.i), and normal (Gi) 5 groups. Fifteen males from each of these categories served as 5s. The manipulated independent variable was skin temperature. The dependent variables were verbal reports of WDT, PT, PTO, and pupillary response. Gi and Gs 5s had significantly lower mean PTs and PTOs than G-2 5s. Significantly fewer G 2 and G 3 5s than Gi and Gt 5s reported PT and PTO. The mean pupillary responses of G 2 5s were significantly smaller than those of Gi and G 3 5s at WDT, PT, and PTO. It was concluded that: (a) chronic institutionalized psychiatric patients display weaker reactions to potentially harmful stimuli; (4) a dissociation between autonomic and verbal responses may occur in process schizophrenics at higher than moderate levels of noxious stimulation.Many clinicians in the past have reported lesser sensitivity to pain in mental hospital schizophrenic patients (Arieti, 1955;Bender & Schilder, 1930;Bleuler, 1924). This topic, which is of both theoretical and practical importance, has been investigated in only a few experimental studies.Hall and Stride (1954), using the thermal stimulation method of Hardy, Wolff, and Goodell (1940), found a great majority of psychiatric patients to be more sensitive to painful stimulation than normals. However, the pain sensitivity of 14 chronic schizophrenics included in their sample was lower than that of other patients and normal controls. This finding was confirmed by the studies of Goldfarb (1958) and Petrie (1967).Several investigators have used autonomic nervous system and striated muscle tonus responses as measures of reactions to noxious stimuli in various groups of mental patients