[Redway]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

You don't agree with schizoaffective label? Kraepelin himself, whose book you cite, eventually questioned sharp division between schizophrenia and mood disorders and allowed that some cases may fall in between the two.
I dunno, my gut feeling is to treat disorders of affect separately from psychotic symptoms, like I said earlier.
Then again who really knows? As you say, DSM itself keeps on tinkering with the whole system. Probably we don't know yet how to classify things properly.

That’s where other types of bipolar psychosis and the unsystematic schizophrenias (paraphrenias) come in. A true schizobiopolar mix almost doesn’t exist it’s that rare. 8 time’s out of ten schizoaffective psychosis is a misdiagnosis.

You’ll have to forget all about the DSM and the artificial division between affective and psychotic symptoms. It’s only recently in the DSM that psychosis has been limited to hallucinations and delusions but that’s not the original definition of psychosis or how it works in reality. Like I say a psychosis is just a mental illness in the truest sense of the word. Compared to the neuroses that don’t involve the mental plain directly (just nervous symptoms).

Schizophrenia’s a type of premature dementia. Hallucinations and delusions are just accessory symptoms of a defect syndrome that’s going on in the background and those accessory symptoms are just as common in schizophrenia as they are in other forms of dementia and other psychoses (including bipolar disorder). You’re already going wrong by hyping up the accessory symptoms assuming that hallucinations always point at schizophrenia and nothing else.

Like I say the DSM’s trash. Familiarise yourself with Kraepelin and Leonard.