This Article  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

John E. Helzer, MD
Department of Psychiatry Washington University School of Medicine 4940 Audubon Ave St Louis, MO 63110

Ian F. Brockington, MD
The Institute of psychiatry London

R. E. Kendell, MD
Royal Edinburgh Hospital Edinberg

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1982;39(3):357.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

— We certainly agree with Dr Fenton that the criterion of six months of illness adds considerably to the predictive power of the DSM-III definition, and presumably the Feighner definition, of schizophrenia. As we stated in the article that Dr Fenton's letter addresses: "It is clear that [the requirement of six months of illness] is the main predictor of the measures we have included under general outcome...." However, we hesitate to jump to the conclusion that "... for both definitions predictive validity derives only from the six-month duration requirement." The key may well be a combination of the psychotic phenomena specified by these two definitions and some duration of illness, which, as we suggested, may be less than six months. Fortunately, there is no need to jump to conclusions at all since this is an empirical question and a study currently under way by us may help to provide the answer. . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?