Research in schizophrenia and the discontinuation of antipsychotic medications.

This article, and the accompanying one by Dr. Carpenter, discuss the benefits and risks associated with taking patients with schizophrenia off medications for research purposes. This article reviews the concept that at least some forms of schizophrenia are progressive.

Prenatal origin of schizophrenia in a subgroup of discordant monozygotic twins.

Neuropathological, obstetrical, and epidemiological evidence increasingly suggest that some cases of adult-onset schizophrenia have prenatal or neonatal etiological roots. We evaluated the developmental histories of 23 monozygotic twin pairs discordant for schizophrenia to determine when they markedly and permanently began diverging from each other in motor skills or unusual behavior. Seven of the twins (30%) who later developed schizophrenia had become permanently different from their cotwins by age 5 years.

How much psychiatry are medical students really learning? : a reappraisal after two decades.

The results of a survey conducted in 1986 of the attitudes of nonpsychiatric house staff toward their psychiatric training in medical school were compared with the results of a similar survey conducted in 1966. Compared to the 1966 cohort, the 1986 cohort reported markedly reduced emphasis on the teaching of psychodynamics and an increased emphasis on neurobiology. Psychiatry continued to be regarded as the most poorly taught and the least well learned subject in medical school.