[Differential diagnosis between obsessive neurosis and schizophrenia in children].

Under study there were 116 patients with obsessive neurosis who had fallen sick in childhood and adolescence, as well as 28 schizophrenics with obsessive syndrome who had fallen sick at the same age, and were at first observed by pedopsychiatrists as patients with the obsessive neurosis. Dynamic clinical and catamnestic studies of the two groups of the patients have enabled the authors to specify a number of signs supplementing the criteria of differentiating those diseases described in literature. Characteristic of the obsessive neurosis are signs of perseverance of the "through" syndrome, i. e. the type of the obsessive syndrome (compulsive, phobic, or mixed compulsive-phobic one) determining this or that clinical variant of the neurosis throughout the whole disease. Patients with schizophrenia show a tendency to a "regressive" time course of the syndrome, i. e. to addition of obsessions corresponding to earlier levels of the psychic response.