Relatives Of Schizophrenic Patients Research Articles

A scale for detection of negative attitudes towards medication among relatives of schizophrenic patients.

The validity of a questionnaire developed to assess negative attitudes towards drug therapy by relatives of schizophrenic patients is examined. The questionnaire items are tested against the statement: "Patients should not take drugs, they can only be helped by good advice". The prejudice of relatives of schizophrenics against drug therapy may have an effect on the patients' compliance to maintenance therapy and, subsequently, on their relapse rate. A number of factors, social and psychological, were examined as possible determinants of the negative attitudes of relatives. These factors include age, sex, profession, education, positive family history, and use of drugs among the relatives; mental state, residence, duration of illness, relapse rate and clinical features in the patients. Poor education of relatives correlated to negative attitudes towards drug therapy.

Validating schizotypal personality disorders: problems with the schizophrenia connection.

The author questions the assumption that family relationship should be given primacy as the validating criterion in establishing diagnostic items for the DSM-III definition of schizotypal personality disorder (SPD). The presenting characteristics of clinically defined patients may be quite different from those that best describe the nonpatient relatives of schizophrenic patients encountered in genetic or high-risk studies. Since the DSM-III nomenclature is meant primarily for use in clinical settings, it must be based on symptom characteristics found in patients, not in nonpatient relatives. If the DSM-III SPD definitions are not optimal for genetic and high-risk studies, special criteria sets will be necessary for such research.

Characteristics of expressed emotion: its relationship to speech and looking in schizophrenic patients and their relatives.

The measure expressed emotion (EE) is an established indicator of characteristics in the relatives of schizophrenic patients which predict relapse. Despite this, little is known of its construct validity except that schizophrenic patients are less calm in the presence of high EE than low EE relatives. There is also tentative evidence that schizophrenic patients show heightened avoidance responses to aversive social stimuli. It was therefore hypothesized that acutely ill schizophrenic patients would show social behaviours characteristic of avoidance in interaction with high but not low EE relatives. This hypothesis was not confirmed as no patient difference was found, but there were differences in the behaviour of high and low EE relatives. High EE relatives spend more interview time talking and less in looking at the patients. Low EE relatives were more prepared to be silent. This is consistent with the general tendency of high EE relatives to be socially intrusive and low EE relatives to be supportive to schizophrenic patients.

Problem behaviours encountered by families living with a schizophrenic member.

Attention is focused on the problem behaviours encountered by relatives of schizophrenic patients. Seventy families, members of the "Friends of Schizophrenics" association completed a questionnaire aimed at eliciting specific problem behaviours from the perspective of the relative. By far, the most frequent problems were concerned with the 'negative' symptoms of schizophrenia while the problems found most difficult to manage included those to do with insight compliance and 'positive' symptoms.

Siblings of schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients. Psychopathology and gender concordance.

THE FREQUENCY and type of psychiatric abnormality in the relatives of schizophrenic patients is of critical importance in testing both genetic and psychogenic theories of the etiology of schizophrenia. A large number of studies over the years have found the prevalence of schizophrenia in the siblings of schizophrenic patients (index cases) to be many times greater than it is in the general population (the most common figure, uncorrected for risk age, is 8%, which is about eight times greater than the general population). Lidz et al¹have concluded that schizophrenia in the index case is but the extreme of a spectrum of personality disorders found in the children of parents who have created a malignant psychotoxic developmental environment. In a study of 24 sibs of 18 adolescent or young adult hospitalized schizophrenic patients from upper-class socially intact families, these authors found

A psychiatric assessment of the adoptive parents of schizophrenics

IN THIS paper we shall present some preliminary findings from one of a group of studies initiated by Dr. Kety, Dr. Rosenthal and myself. The purpose of these studies is to assess the relative contributions of genetics and experience in the etiology of the schizophrenic syndromes. All three studies depend on the same research strategy: studying persons adopted at an early age. This device allows us to separate and thus unconfound genetic and experiential variables. Previous studies exploring the etiology of schizophrenia have employed three major lines of approach: (1) consanguinity studies-assessment of the prevalence of mental disease in the relatives of schizophrenic patients; (2) twin studies; (3) psychodynamic and family studies-studies of the psychological environment of schizophrenic patients, their interaction with their parents and the pattern of family interaction to which they have been exposed. All of these approaches have revealed two facts quite clearly. First, that schizophrenics have an increased prevalence of schizophrenic and other psychopathology among their relatives; second, that schizophrenic patients have often been exposed to a variety of deviant psychological experiences during childhood and later life. What makes interpretation of these facts difficult is that the deviant psychological experiences have usually been received at the hands of the patients’ biological relatives. It is impossible to decide to what extent the disturbance in the schizophrenic offspring has been genetically or psychologically transmitted, since the deviance in the parents’ child rearing techniques may be a manifestation or forme fruste of schizophrenic illness in the parents rather than a cause of illness in the child. The data accumulated so far are compatible with both the biological and social transmission of schizophrenia and do not permit an evaluation of the relative contributions of either. Inspecting these data, we are in a position analogous to that of a nafve observer who has found an increased prevalence of red hair and talking Chinese, respectively, in the relatives of redheaded and Chinese-speaking probands; without further knowledge, this observer could not ascertain the mechanism of transmission of these characteristics. A technique which may permit evaluation of the contributions of social experience and genetic transmission in the etiology of the schizophrenias is one which occurred to each of the authors independently. As mentioned, this technique involves the study of subjects adopted in infancy. In the Adoptive Parents Project we began with schizophrenic patients adopted in infancy and studied their adoptive parents. Since the biological parents are not

The relatives of schizophrenic patients: clinical judgments of potential emotional resourcefulness.

Relatives of acutely, ill, hospitalized schizophrenic patients were assessed for their potential resourcefulness. The assessment was based on nine personal and psychiatric traits. Seventy-five per cent of the sample had at least mild potential for resourcefulness. Wives, fathers and siblings were overrepresented in this group whereas mothers and husbands constituted the group of relatives with poor or no potential for resourcefulness.

Effects of LSD-25 on relatives of schizophrenic patients.

Schizophrenic patients given LSD-25 show an increase of psychopathological phenomena and a regression to the prime stage of their psychosis, the manifestations of which seem to be more directly related to the life history of the patients.∗ It has also been observed that some “normal” experimental subjects show various paranoid symptoms with the same drug, but whether these are in any way determined by heredity is not known.