Psychiatric types: a Q-technique study of 200 patients.

Abstract

Psychiatry is handicapped in the task of evaluating new methods of treatment because it has had to tackle the problems presented by early and mild cases without modern psychometric methods. There is clearly something wrong when the spontaneous remission rate in schizophrenia can be reported by the New York State Hospitals as 59 per cent. (1944) at a time when the equivalent figure in Kent (Monro, 1950) was 24 per cent. The practical impact of this failure to define terms is that the majority of articles describing the results of new treatments lose most of their force. This happens most obviously when the cases considered are presented simply in diagnostic categories, for example, as x schizophrenics or y hysterics. The trouble can be lessened by giving more clinical detail, but seldom can enough diagnostic and prognostic information be given to enable the reader to arrive at a proper evaluation of the issues presented. New descriptive techniques are therefore an urgent practical necessity, as well as being theoretically desirable.