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A case history of a man with atypical psychosis who exhibited catatonic stupor is reported. Amytal interview procedures used and the differential diagnosis for catatonia are discussed. Response to Loxitane was excellent, though this was clouded by the patient's belief in root medicine, a source of cultural incongruity between him and his therapist. Distinguishing between psychosis and cultural belief systems is shown to be essential in therapy.

Daily behavioral observations were made for several years on 10 male schizophrenic patients and on three male patients with organic brain disorders. Analysis of these data showed strong cyclic components in the five schizophrenic patients with predominantly hebephrenic symptomatology. Period lengths noted were about 2 days, 5 to 6 days, 30 days, and a longer cycle of 40 to 100 days duration. Antipsychotic medications appear to have a suppressant effect, but tricyclic antidepressants may enhance pre-existing rhythms.

Pointer dogs learn complex hunting tasks such as vigorous aim-directed activity in tracking specific birds and sudden rigid immobility "on point" at appropriate distance from the prey. In the presence of a human, dogs of the Arkansas Line of Nervous Pointers show markedly reduced activity. In close quarters, where they cannot flee, they usually react to humans by freezing. These responses do not extinguish. The breed demonstrates a strong capacity to inhibit motion. In our nervous dogs, this trait is greatly exaggerated. In the search for an objective and rapidly modifiable target motor sign to correlate with biochemical and pharmacological events, we discovered that 10 of 10 nervous dogs, in contrast to kennel mates of a normal line, developed tonic immobility (TI) which was induced by manual inversion into a sling and stroking. This is the first systematic demonstration of TI in mature dogs. The TI was accompanied by reduced telemetered heart rate (HR) compared to baseline. Release from the inverted position was accompanied by marked HR increase. In the absence of humans, both before and after the inversion, all nervous dogs showed little or no movement about the testing area. This was in contrast to the nine normal line dogs, which were comparable in age and sex. These normal dogs were very active before and after inversion into the sling. Five of the normals remained in the sling but did not show head and neck immobility and were generally relaxed. Their HRs increased slightly while in the inverted position, thereafter returning to baseline. The four normals which righted themselves soon after the inversion showed reduced HR with the resumed activity. We discuss possible mechanisms and review some of the implications for psychiatry and behavioral biology.

All hospital records, interviews, and notes are reviewed on a group of 52 chronic hebephrenic/catatonic schizophrenics who were institutionalized before the era of antipsychotic medications. The authors catalog the presence or absence of individual symptoms of schizophrenia on a year by year basis over a span of 25 years and present this data in a series of bar graphs. Symptoms such as avolition, impaired social interaction, and flat affect become more frequent over the 25 years of follow-up. Hallucinations and delusions become less frequent. Eighteen of the patients are noted to have had a DSM-III personality disorder premorbidly and eight of these are characterized as schizoid personality disorder. Level of insight is found to be poor at the onset of schizophrenia and deteriorates further over the next 5 years. Although the study design contains a sampling bias in favor of chronically institutionalized cases, several lines of evidence suggest that the trends reported here are not artifacts of institutionalization but are due to schizophrenia.