Aberrancies in associative processes in a patient with bipolar affective disorder and panic attacks.

Abstract

A 42-yr.-old woman diagnosed as having bipolar schizoaffective illness also showed the major characteristics of panic disorders with recurrent anxiety attacks. She was an outpatient of an affective disorder clinic and put under lithium treatment. As already demonstrated (Pons, et nl., 1985), the word association test gives different results for bipolar illness and panic disorders: the number of responses that are both common and repeated (MCRR index) are significantly lower for bipolar illness than for normal persons and those with panic disorder. The present patient was given the word-association test four times with four different lists of 20 words as stimuli, these having varied associative frequencies. The measurements of the MCRR index are reported in Table 1 and show that before and after a panic attack the patient behaved as if manic