MALIGNANT TUMORS IN THE INSTITUTIONALIZED PSYCHOTIC POPULATION

Abstract

CONSIDERABLE research has been done on the relation of personality structure to such elements of constitution as body habitus, endocrine responsivity and autonomic reactivity. There have been many indications that it might also be fruitful to correlate trends of cellular pathology with personality reactions. Previous work tends to direct particular interest to malignant tumors. Lewis1divided schizophrenic patients, on the basis of their mental reaction types, into two groups: (1) regressive, comprising the catatonic and hebephrenic reaction types, and (2) hypercompensatory, embracing the paranoid types. He then studied the extraneural pathology of each group and concluded that in the former group atrophy, hypoplasia and fibrosis, but rarely malignant changes, is characteristic, whereas the latter group tends toward hypertrophy, hyperplasia and malignant change. These groups are antithetical, but within each group the direction of the psychic and pathological trends is analogous. As cited by White,2he characterized this correlation