Psychiatrists Report Praecox Feeling and Find It Reliable. A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

The psychopathological notion of the Praecox Feeling (PF) refers to an experience of strangeness and bizarreness that arises in a clinician during contact with a patient with schizophrenia. There is evidence that psychiatrists take advantage of this feeling in their diagnostic decisions despite the domination of an operationalized diagnostic approach. The article presents the results of a survey assessing the self-reported prevalence of the PF among psychiatrists in Poland and compares them with data from West Germany (1962), USA (1989), and France (2017) based on the same survey.