Studies of the Course of Schizophasia

Abstract

The course of psychoses of schizophrenic type follows rules which are still not adequately understood. It is, however, clear that certain symptoms appear mostly early, others only late. With this hypothesis in mind, we studied 44 final phase patients whose main symptom was disordered thinking of the schizophasic type and whose illness was of at least 10 years’ standing. The most important finding of this study is that the varied and unspecific initial phase progresses into a highly specific syndrome. The symptoms initially registered include various disorders of thinking in less than one third of patients. In no case did these involve schizophasia. In a second phase symptoms were observed such as paralogism, echolalia, verbigeration, circumstantiality, neologism, hypotonic thinking, perseveration, blocking. The symptoms of schizophasia are only recognizable in a third phase and are highly specific. This enables us to confute the claim that psychiatric syndromes are not clinically specific. The three phases described above also provide evidence for the biological nature of this endogenous psychosis.

Network Analysis of Language Disorganization in Patients with Schizophrenia

“…It has been reported that the first, second, and third phases of the course of schizophrenia are characterized by thinking disorders, neologism and others, and schizophasia, respectively. 22 Thus, the possibility that language disorganization may be a chronic feature of schizophrenia rather than a core symptom of schizophrenia cannot be overlooked. However, as per our findings, disclosure failure has been the most central domain with the network of language disorganization, followed by excess syntactic constraints and abnormal prosody.…”

Contour Copying or Echoplasia – A New Echo Phenomenon in a Person with Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

“…Cath et al [17] emphasize that symptoms in GTS, even when sharing superficial similarities with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, Echo phenomena are environmentdriven responses [1] occurring in different disorders, e.g. the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) [2,3] , schizophrenic disorders [4,5] including catatonia [6,7] , aphasias [8,9] , autism [10][11][12] , epilepsy [13] , frontotemporal dementia [14] , Pick's disease [15] and neuropsychiatric systemic lupus erythematosus [16] . They are defined as pathological imitations of external stimuli.…”