Psychosis Occurring in the Senium a Review of an Industrial Population

Abstract

Roth and his associates (1952, 1955, 1956) making observations on the classification and prognosis of psychotic illness occurring in elderly people found that the majority of patients fell into five main diagnostic categories; about half were cases of affective psychosis, most of which responded to E.C.T., and the rest suffered from arteriosclerotic and senile psychosis, paraphrenia and delirium. All the groups, with the exception of the senile psychotics, showed a considerable proportion of physical illness, particularly the cases of affective psychosis whose first attacks occurred after the age of sixty years. Most of the cases of delirium were physically ill and of the paraphrenics 30 per cent. were either blind or deaf.