Mania with emotional blunting: affective disorder or schizophrenia?

Fourteen of 134 consecutively admitted manic patients exhibited emotional blunting in addition to the full manic syndrome. The authors compared these 14 blunted manic patients with the remaining 120 nonblunted manic patients and with 31 schizophrenic patients admitted during the same period. They found that the blunted manic patients more closely resembled schizophrenic than nonblunted manic patients on most of the demographic, clinical, and familial variables studied. Although mania with blunting may represent a variant of schizophrenia, the etiologic association between long-term neuroleptic administration and emotional blunting requires further study.