Organic Brain Disorders in the Aetiology of Schizophrenia

During the present century a considerable literature has grown up reporting the association of trauma or illness of the central nervous system with the appearance of an illness closely resembling schizophrenia. However, these reports have been scattered and the possibility that organic trauma of the brain could cause schizophrenia in the absence of a heredity or premorbid personality indicative of this illness has been ignored by most psychiatrists. In 1963 Dr. Eliot Slater and his colleagues published an important paper on the schizophrenia-like psychoses of epilepsy. They found that an illness indistinguishable from schizophrenia was found in epileptic patients and especially in those with temporal lobe epilepsy, with a frequency that was much greater than the expectation based on chance expectation alone* Through the initiative of Dr. Slater, a major review of the literature on the association of schizophrenia-like conditions with all kinds of organic disorders of the centralnervous system, including epilepsy, was undertaken by Davison and Bagley.