title: [Querulous patients].
abstract: Querulousnes is no uniform psychiatric phenomenon and no disease entity. Causes and occasions are of the most various types, difficult to compare between persons, often moulded by the currents of the day, inherited ways of thinking, experiences and environment. Querulants are personalities, who, after colliding with the legal system and having had their own claims dismissed, suffer from an often chief and irremediable feeling of being victim of an injustice. They cannot understand that, what is in due form valid can, when, scrutinized with the greatest sense of justice and practical common sense, impress upon someone as injustice. The submission to the unattainable, the parting from hopes, expectations and claims do not materialize. The step by step stiffening readiness for action can be confined to the lawsuit matter, it comes however about, that it extends to further spheres of life. Escalations occur in particular then, when the authorities course of action, courts of justice and opponents are felt as tyrants or mortal threat. A person deriving a meaning from his entire life or events, which he interprets for himself, makes his relations to the community and Law fragile [90]. Are presented within the framework of differential diagnostic distinctions, manifestations of querulous behaviour among abnormal personalities, neurotic disorders and schizophrenic psychoses under psychiatric aspects. Brought into sharper focus are the psychogenic psychoses, which became manifest in the USA, GUS and scandinavian countries in connection with serious querulous evolutions. Hints to decision of the supreme court and forensic psychiatric expert opinion conclude the article.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Universität Heidelberg.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Möllhoff
mesh_terms: D005104:Expert Testimony / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D006801:Humans; D016365:Liability, Legal; D008318:Malpractice / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D009497:Neurotic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011602:Psychophysiologic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D011618:Psychotic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology
vernacular_title: Querulanten.