This study of 70 schizophrenic patients used a lexical decision task involving the recognition of words that were preceded (primed) either by meaningfully or phonologically associated or by nonassociated words to study the intrusion of contextually inappropriate associations in thought disorder (TD). The patients were split into subgroups of TD and non-TD patients, and the data from these two groups were compared with data from 44 normal control participants. TD schizophrenic patients exhibited more semantic priming than non-TD patients and controls, and differences in phonological priming dependent on stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were obtained. Results support the hypotheses of an increase in activation or a decrease in inhibition in the spreading of semantic and phonological associations in TD schizophrenic patients.

No abstract

The drug difference between a low and a high dosage of haloperidol was investigated in 40 acutely ill schizophrenic patients. All patients were classified as being thought disordered or non-thought disordered schizophrenic using psychometric methods. From the pool of 40 patients two groups were randomly chosen for the double-blind study, one group receiving 80 mg of liquid haloperidol daily, the other group 16 mg of liquid haloperidol daily. On 5 days during the 21-day treatment the psychopathological state of the patient was evaluated by means of the AMDP system.

An experiment lasting 6 years with an organizational principle called ‘separate responsibility’ is described. Its aim was to promote open two-way communication in an acute psychiatric admission clinic, by dividing power, i.e. responsibility for individual patients and patients as a group, over two multidisciplinary treatment teams. Multidisciplinarity, however, turned out to be impossible to maintain for different reasons. Instead, a splitting occurred of medical and nursing disciplines through identification of the former with individual treatment and of the latter with the patient groups. An unproductive loss of common treatment goals was the result leading to a near closing down of the clinic. Putting medical and nursing personnel into one team, responsible for the entire treatment of the unit, restored productivity and improved treatment and the working climate.