Reflections on Saugstad's "social class, marriage, and fertility in schizophrenia".
Saugstad (1989) recently proposed a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia and manic depressive illness that emphasizes the importance of biological maturation. Early maturation is proposed to be critical to manic-depressive illness and late maturation to schizophrenia. There are three goals of the comments that follow: (1) to place the neurodevelopmental theory in a broader context of ongoing research in sex differences in psychopathology; (2) to address some conceptual ambiguities in the model, especially with respect to within-schizophrenia comparisons; and (3) to offer a suggestion for a critical test of a maturation hypothesis of schizophrenia.
Lewine
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Department of Psychiatry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000209:etiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage; D012307:Risk Factors; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000209:etiology*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012737:Sex Factors; D012741:Sexual Maturation; D012923:Social Class