For the majority of patients, group psychotherapy in the in-patient setting is associated with adverse events. Changes over time and a strong correlation with general symptom severity must be considered in the assessment and interpretation of adverse events. Predictors should be considered as potential risk factors in future research.

Against the background of clinical and anthropological considerations, the case studies of eleven patients with coenaesthetic schizophrenia (F 20.8 in ICD-10) are evaluated with regard to how the patients experience the disorders of corporal perception. Additional criteria for the evaluation are whether the disorders receive a special significance in dealing with the psychosis, and whether they influence compliance with medicinal intake. In two cases, the coenaesthesies were experienced as making the patients happy, they were used by the patients to strengthen themselves, and so the motivation for medicinal therapy was accordingly small. Of the remaining nine patients who suffered from the body perception disorder, five were not willing to accept neuroleptic therapy. The author ascribes this above all to two behaviours: the patients either deny their symptoms, or they attempt to use them to compensate for ego-weakness. However, an effect of self-stabilisation through the coenaesthesies, as measured by social capabilities, is not objectively recognisable.

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a hard-to-treat disorder that often coincides with depression and suicidal tendency. We investigate the correlations between depression and BDD in an idiographic study of 5 patients receiving treatment in the psychiatric ward of a general hospital in 2008. Among these patients we found common triggering factors – mainly separation – that were associated with humiliation, childhood stresses, worries in regard to attractiveness and masculinity, and personality structures showing dependent-avoidant, self-insecure and sensitive traits, as described by Kretschmer. It transpired that their BDD had developed out of a self-aggravating cycle of shame, controlling actions, alienation and self-disempowerment. After a certain period their self-disempowerment then gradually transforms into a depressive cycle of despair, increased withdrawal, inward-directed anger and self-depreciation. These correlations indicate that the depressive symptomatology among these patients can be better classified as adjustment disorder in regard to their BDD than as independent major depression. Finally, we present dance/movement therapy as a promising additional psychotherapeutic approach that can complement the recognized therapy forms (serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and cognitive behavioral therapy).

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Psychopathy is a well explored dimensional construct only partially overlapping with dissocial personality disorder according to ICD-10. Until now, psychopaths have not been assessed as having diminished legal responsibility, unless they show impulsive or dissocial behaviour in an early stage of development, since they are considered able to adapt themselves to social norms. This forensic practice has been criticised from a deterministic-neurobiological point of view. This article discusses whether the latest empirical results on the psychopath's capacity for decision-making, empathy, and morality should lead to a new assessment of legal responsibility. The author shows that the psychopath's reduced capacities for decision-making, response reversal, and emotional empathy do not tell us much about the way such an individual arrives at decisions outside the laboratory since there has been no exploration of how compensation is made for psychophysiological deviation. Studies comparing criminal and non-criminal (so called "successful") psychopaths support the view that single physiological findings such as a hypoarousal do not necessarily lead to criminal behaviour. The moral knowledge of psychopaths is not disturbed. That is why criminality seems to be caused mainly by developed motivational factors (risk-seeking and hedonistic life-style). Empirical research into psychopathy may enlarge our knowledge about pathogenesis but does not offer new perspectives concerning legal responsibility.