The Course of Childhood Schizophrenia

Clinical disorders which are characterized by a prolonged and fluctuating time course provide particularly vexing problems for the evaluation of therapeutic results. Chance alone makes it inevitable that spontaneous remissions will coincide from time to time with almost any therapeutic measure if it be employed with sufficient frequency. When such chronic disorders occur in children, their complexity is further multiplied by the developmental process, with its own internal clock, which now races ahead, now slows down, and is likely to be deranged by the illness itself. Once again, it seems inescapable that steps in maturation will now and again follow the introduction of new treatment programs. The very eagerness of the investigator, as a physician, to relieve the suffering caused by the illness makes him all too ready to assign the changes observed to the agent he is administering at the time. If there be any characteristic of childhood schizophrenia