SELECTED PERSONAL AND FAMILY DATA ON 400 PSYCHIATRIC INPATIENTS
Abstract
The type of data analyzed in the present study may provide evidence concerning the validity of clinical diagnosis in psychiatry, a differential contribution of hereditary and environmental factors in the etiology of specific diagnoses, and association between objective criteria of environmental influence and various diagnostic categories.
Selected personal and family data were recorded soon after admission on 400 out of 449 consecutive psychiatric patients admitted to the University of Minnesota Hospitals and assigned to the care of residents under the supervision of a staff psychiatrist. The data on 30 patients (with diagnoses of organic brain syndromes, mental deficiency, or observation only) were discarded, and the data on the remaining 370 patients were divided into 7 major categories for purposes of analysis.
Primary characteristics of patients (particularly age, sex, education and marital status) showed a significant lack of homogeneity among the 7 diagnostic groups, giving some support to the validity of clinical diagnosis in psychiatry. At least it is evident that these diagnostic groups differ from each other significantly with respect to these characteristics, though it remains questionable to what extent they differ in their manifestations, etiology or response to treatment.
Most of the selected characteristics involving parents and sibships failed to show deviations from homogeneity among the 7 diagnostic groups, and hence provided little evidence concerning the influence of specific etiological factors in the development of specific diagnostic syndromes.
In patients with a history of parental suicide or admission to mental hospital, certain diagnoses were represented more or less frequently than expected on a random basis. However, this association between patient diagnosis and parental psychopathology may be related to either genetic or environmental factors.
The increased frequencies of certain diagnoses among patients with intervals of less than two years between themselves and their preceding or following siblings are suggestive of environmental influences in the etiology of the diagnostic groups involved, but the findings in this relatively small and heterogeneous sample must be regarded as very tentative.
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