Sarnoff A. Mednick

Some premorbid characteristics related to breakdown in children with schizophrenic mothers

SCHIZOPHRENICS excite a good deal of behavioral research, the goal of much of this research is to produce information concerning the etiology of schizophrenia. It may be difficult, however, to isolate such etiological factors through studies carried out with individuals who have lived through the process of becoming and being schizophrenic. The behavior of these individuals may be markedly altered in response to correlates of the illness such as educational, economic and social failure, prehospital, hospital and post-hospital drug regimens, bachelorhood, long term institutionalization, chronic illness and sheer misery. In research with non-schizophrenics, these same factors have been shown to measurably affect behavioral research results. If researchers used control groups which were equated with their schizophrenic groups for all of these correlates of schizophrenia, then any observed differences could reasonably be ascribed to the variable of schizophrenia. But such control groups are apparently not readily available. Consequently, in comparisons of normals and schizophrenics, it is often difficult to judge what portion of the reported differences have unique relevance to schizophrenia. If, for example, comparisons of non-psychiatric prisoners and normals produced identical differences we might tend to attribute the schizophrenicnormal differences to the effects of institutionalization rather than some intrinsic quality of the schizophrenic. In view of these considerations we decided to attempt to study the schizophrenic before he became ill. We turned to the study of young, high-risk populations (children with schizophrenic mothers). There are certain advantages in examining such subjects: