The Significance of Psychopathological Classification in Interpreting Biochemical Findings

Abstract

The empirical background of my contribution is a research programme in schizophrenics executed by Jellinger as the morphologist, Riederer and for some time Reynolds as the biochemists and myself as the psychiatric clinician. It is a post mortem study on Spiroperidolbinding in brain tissue of patients who in most cases died after a long stay in a psychiatric hospital. I stress these 3 disciplines we are representatives of and the special design of a post mortem study because these facts both lead to the problem of case definition and -identification and at the same time point out preconditions of such kind of studies which perhaps influence its results. I would like to mention only 2 points depending on the design which are related closely to the topic of my communication.