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Eighty one patients with schizophrenic or similar psychoses were tested three times using different psychopathological scales: at the beginning and at the end of clinical treatment, and 5-6 years after discharge. The psychopathometrical description showed an improvement in productive-psychotic and depressive-apathetic symptoms during clinical treatment and the deterioration at follow-up. For example 67% of the patients suffered from marked paranoid symptoms at admission, only 14% at discharge, but 30% at follow-up. The configuration-frequency-analysis on syndrome-intensities allowed a more differentiated insight into the frequency of improvement and deterioration in particular cases. As to paranoid symptoms for example, 26% of the patients showed deterioration at follow-up. The majority of the depressive states seen on discharge were already in existence on admission. The results of the self-rating and the rating by the psychiatrist was not in complete concordance.

A psychopathometric study on the course of schizophrenic patients was carried out in order to analyse the long-term prognostic value of the psychopathological state on clinical admission and discharge. Eighty-one patients with schizophrenic or similar psychoses were rate three times using well-validated psychopathological scales ("Inpatient Multidimensional Psychiatric Scale", "Clinical Selfrating Scales"): in the beginning, at the end of clinical treatment and 5-6 years after discharge. As for differentiated or global outcome-criteria, the psychopathological state on discharge was of more prognostic importance than the psychopathological state on admission. There existed syndrome-specific relationships between discharge and follow-up, i.e., in general each syndrome correlated most closely with itself between the two times of measurement. As for global outcome criteria, depressive-apathetic symptoms were of more special importance than productive schizophrenic symptoms indicating a poor outcome. The stepwise multiple regression analysis gave prognostically optimal combinations of IMPS-syndromes at admission and discharge which were different for each outcome criterium. Nevertheless, some syndromes were repeatedly among the best predictors. The combination of best predictors explained a greater part of outcome-variance than one predictor alone. The prognostic value of the combination could be optimated by including the factors of the self-rating scales.