Search

Background: Insight affects adherence and treatment outcome and relates to cognitive impairment and psychopathology. We investigated the relationship of insight with cognition in patients with major depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in acute psychiatric care, long-term inpatient, and outpatient settings. Methods: Eighty-one patients (women, 59.5%; age, 45.9 ± 13.5 years; 27 in each setting group; 33.3% with DSM-IV bipolar disorder, 39.5% with unipolar major depression, and 27.2% with schizophrenia) underwent the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) to test flexibility, clinician-rated Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder (SUMD), and self-rated Insight Scale (IS) to assess insight/awareness. Results: Poor performance on the WCST correlated with higher SUMD scores such as current psychiatric illness unawareness, impaired symptom attribution, unawareness of medication effect, or of social consequences, but not with IS scores. The latter correlated with days on continuous treatment. Patients receiving psycho-education showed greater symptom awareness compared to patients treated with drugs alone. Cognitive flexibility and diagnostic category did not correlate. Poor insight corresponded with severe mental illness, particularly acute psychosis. Conclusions: Treatment setting specificity reflects psychopathology and severity. Insight is inversely proportional to illness severity and cognitive flexibility, which is also affected by psychopathology. Limitations comprise group heterogeneity, cross-sectional design, and limited sample size.

Cotard’s syndrome is a delusional syndrome, first described in the 1880ies by Cotard, characterized by a nihilistic delusions about the self and/or the world. In same other cases there is an intense nihilistic belief that the patient’s entire body or parts of it are disintegrated or dead. The syndrome is often associated with severe depression, but are also described neurological cases. Koro was described a little later from Asia and consisted in the belief that one’s own genitalia are shrinking or disappearing and death will ensue thereafter, but there are many cultural variants and the syndrome may present in an incomplete form. We report on a KLS sharing more features with annihilation delusions, such as Cotard’s syndrome. In KLS, the délire de négation may be limited to localized systems or organs. We believe that some complete and incomplete forms of Koro, when embedded in a depressive core, may represent a variant of Cotard’s delusion. In fact, our patient did not reach a complete denial of his entire body, but rather focused on sexual identity. We analysed the psychosexual issues of our case according to Kretschmer’s 1918 view of a “bipolar setting” between sthenic and asthenic characters of a patient suffering from sensitive delusions of (self-) reference. This view may allow us to relate the personological character to the genetic comprehensibility of the delusion.