Family Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is not known to be hereditary, but if one member of a family suffers from it, there is a greater than average chance that others will. To find out how a disturbed family affects the children. Psychiatrist Lyman Wynne and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health interviewed 33 families in patient detail. In Cincinnati last week, Dr. Wynne outlined his findings.

Even apart from delusions and hallucinations, the schizophrenic usually thinks the way normal people do in dreams: individual thoughts may be "rational," but they are so compressed or confused in time and place as to make no sense, and the schizophrenic sees nothing abnormal in lumping together two unrelated or contradictory ideas.

This pattern gave Dr. Wynne his clue. Individuals in a family may show few or no outward signs of illness, but if their statements do not mesh rationally with one another's, the result is a "cognitive chaos" for the developing child, most sensitive between ages two and four. From a tape recording, he quoted a revealing example:

Daughter: Nobody will listen to me. Everybody is trying to still me.

Mother: Nobody wants to kill you.

Father: If you're going to associate with intelligent people, you're going to have to remember that "still" is a noun and not a verb.

From another tape:

Father (to patient, repeatedly): Come on and sit down--for your own good.

Patient: The Constitution is written in the land for one person. It's written by the people, for the people and of the people.

Father: That's what I say . . . When she's sitting down, she's for the people and by the people. She's pleasing the people and pleasing herself.

In such families, said Dr. Wynne, there is "an underlying feeling of meaninglessness and pessimism about the possibility of finding meaning in any experience or behavior." And that, he added in effect, is enough to drive anybody crazy.

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