Patients hospitalized for schizophrenia show marked individual differences. A few of them improve rapidly. They return to their homes and make a fairly satisfactory social, marital, and industrial adjustment. Others make a moderate improvement and make marginal adjustments in these areas. Many require almost continuous hospitalization. The severity of the psychotic behavior on admission, the psychometric and projective tests, and the social history fail as accurate guides in prognosis. Race, sex, creed, and indices of endocrine disturbance likewise fail to correlate with the degree of improvement. Even the method of treatment fails to alter appreciably the natural course of the illness. Recent studies by Hastings1 reaffirm this observation, which has been made repeatedly. These individual differences in patients must represent basic neurophysiologic variants.
Hoch,2 Rado,3 and others aptly describe schizophrenia as a basic integrative defect in the organization of stimuli coming from within and