Neurologic Organization in Psychiatrically Disturbed Adolescents

THIS IS the second report in an ongoing series of investigations concerned with examining the association between primary central nervous system abnormality and serious psychiatric disturbance in adolescents. In the first of these investigations we examined this association in psychiatrically disturbed adolescent girls1who represented all patients sequentially admitted to the female adolescent service of a psychiatric receiving hospital over a six-month period. On each of the indicators of neurologic dysfunction used in that study it was found that psychiatrically abnormal adolescent girls exhibited a far higher prevalence of neurologic abnormality than would have been expected had they been drawn at random from their age group in the general population. Moreover, the proportion of individuals as well as the frequency with which CNS abnormalities were found varied systematically with the severity of psychiatric illness. The findings of this study encouraged us in our