Childhood Schizophrenia and Mental Deficiency

Abstract

In 1933 Potter expressed the opinion that a careful psychiatric study of patients in institutions for mental defectives “might demonstrate that schizophrenia in children is not as rare as is now generally believed.” Similarly in 1938 O. Lay wrote: “It is possible that many cases exist in institutions for the feebleminded, in which the disorders have been assumed to have existed from birth, and that a close examination would reveal that in the earliest years the patient's development was normal.”