Not Father to the Man

The more psychiatrists learn about mental illnesses, the less willing they become to hang neat diagnostic labels on them. This is especially true of children's mental illnesses, which are so baffling that they defy classification by the most determined nosologist. Yet the term "childhood schizophrenia" has stuck. There has been an enormous increase in this diagnosis, now "fashionable and much abused," says Dr. Hilde L. Mosse in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and it has done great harm to a lot of children.

On the basis of 60 cases Psychiatrist Mosse has seen at Manhattan's Lafargue Clinic and in private practice, "far more often than not this diagnosis is wrong." Without trying to pin on diagnostic labels of her own, Dr. Mosse cites children who showed behavior problems or suffered from common juvenile fantasies, only to be pushed into mental hospitals and given shock treatment, which made them worse.

Whatever the cause of adult schizophrenia (which nobody knows), Dr. Mosse is sure that most of her child patients had illnesses directly traceable to emotional problems (though some had organic defects). Yet she has been unable to find a single proved case where adult schizophrenia could be traced to such emotional injury in early life. The "child schizophrenic," Dr. Mosse concludes, is not father to the adult schizophrenic--indeed, he hardly ever exists.

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