Am J Psychiatry 1985; 142:608-612
Copyright © 1985 by American Psychiatric Association
Mania with emotional blunting: affective disorder or schizophrenia?
VC Jampala, R Abrams and MA Taylor
Fourteen of 134 consecutively admitted manic patients exhibited emotional
blunting in addition to the full manic syndrome. The authors compared these
14 blunted manic patients with the remaining 120 nonblunted manic patients
and with 31 schizophrenic patients admitted during the same period. They
found that the blunted manic patients more closely resembled schizophrenic
than nonblunted manic patients on most of the demographic, clinical, and
familial variables studied. Although mania with blunting may represent a
variant of schizophrenia, the etiologic association between long-term
neuroleptic administration and emotional blunting requires further study.
