Early Bereavement and Schizophrenia

The demonstration by previous investigators (Table I), that more schizophrenics have experienced death of a parent in childhood than have control populations, suggests that the bereavement may be of aetiological importance. Gregory (1958) has criticized the methods of such studies, particularly in regard to their difficulty in obtaining well-matched control groups or data relating to the normal population, and the validity of these findings is therefore uncertain. The investigation described in this paper tries to overcome this methodological difficulty by comparing data on ages at bereavement of schizophrenics with those relating to their non-schizoohrenic sibs.