Folie a famille.

Shared psychotic disorder is often read as case report but not studied in length and rarely looked at in common clinical practice in psychiatry. Only a small percentage of cases involve families. Folie a famille is characterized as a shared psychotic disorder within a family in more than two members. The involved patients have an unusually close relationship and are isolated from others. We describe here a case of folie a famille involving a nuclear family consisting of the husband, the wife, and their three children. The primary patient was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with prominent delusions of persecution that were imposed upon and later shared by his family. Temporary separation decreased the intensity of shared delusions in the other family members.