Cardiazol Treatment of Schizophrenia

Abstract

The term “schizophrenia” was first introduced by Bleuler (1) as descriptive of the dissociation and fragmentation of mental processes which he regarded as the chief characteristic of the condition. There is “a detachment from the world without, and a breaking up of normal psychological connections within. The personality is not integrated as in normal people; thinking emotion, and conduct are discrepant and morbid, yet there is no impairment of formal intelligence such as is found, for example, in organic dementia” (Mapother and Lewis (2)). To quote Bleuler (1), “even though we cannot as yet formulate a natural division within the disease, nevertheless schizophrenia does not appear to us as a disease in the narrower sense but as a disease group, about analogous with the group of the organic dementias, which are divided into paresis, senile forms, etc. One should therefore speak of schizophrenias in the plural. The disease at times runs a chronic course, at times in shifts; it may become stationary at any stage or may regress a certain distance, but probably does not permit of a completerestitutio ad integrum.It is characterized by a specific kind of alteration of thinking and feeling, and of the relations with the outer world that occur nowhere else”.