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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V DEMENTIA PRECOX Dementia precox is perhaps the mental disorder that takes more young people to institutional care than any other. In Washington this gave over one- third of the total admittance for the last biennium. It is a condition of mental deterioration. The cortical cells show some degeneration and the neu- roglia may be increased, but the pathologic findings are limited. The cause of this disease has not been established, but a rather generally accepted theory is that of an endogenous toxic effect, got possibly by the functional disturbance of a sex gland. However, some of the best recent work tends to find a psychogenic beginning, with a loss of balance in the mental metabolism. There are three main groups: the hebephrenic, the katatonic, and the paranoid, which have in common certain fundamental markings. Where conversation is possible the examination usually develops a mental isolation that is characteristic, and makes the somewhat hidden background for other typical manifestations, as negativism and indifference. Amuscular tension frequently emphasizes the negativism, while the apparent indifference may show both in attitude and speech. The clinical picture has been called polymorphous, but these features, Fig. 6.?Dementia precox, hebephrenic type. mentaUsolatifln, negativism, and indifference, are usually in some degree evident. Further, the orientation is persistently good; the patient knows who he is and where he is, though the examiner may be led astray as to his observation in a field that is controlled by some other symptom; and at the time of commitment it is rather usual for some degree of either excitement or stupor to be in evidence. From beginning to end the symptoms are such as may be developed through a mental deterioration, a...

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