Adolescence: Psychosocial Perspectives

EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONThis section deals with two examples of psychiatric conditions, endogenous psychoses and drug abuse, which are commonly encountered in adolescents. These conditions also occur in adults, and the question arises as to whether they have any specific characteristics when they originate in adolescence. We believe that they do not, apart from being colored by the typical psychosocial manifestations of this developmental phase. It is likely that the upheavals of the adolescent crisis play a significant role in the precipitation of some disorders, but probably no more so than other developmental crises, such as pregnancy, childbirth, climacterium, and old age. It also appears that many conditions occur within a context of other signs of psychological disorder and do not appear, as it were, in pure culture. This raises interesting differential diagnostic questions, the most difficult usually being to determine whether the presenting disorder in behavior is simply a particular temporary manifestation of a commonly occurring expectable adolescent upset, or whether it signals the emergence of a clinical syndrome with long-term pathological implications.

These questions are discussed in the chapter on endogenous psychoses by Robert J. Corboz. He devotes most of his attention to a discussion of schizophrenia in adolescence, and he reports that this disorder is nowadays believed by many authorities to originate not only in adults but also in childhood and frequently in adolescence and to occur at these ages in all degrees of severity and prognosis.

When the illness starts in adolescence it is hard to diagnose because the

-271-