No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2023
Nothing is taken more for granted than the feeling that we are in control of our own thoughts and actions. For those who experience thoughts insertion or delusion of control, known as first rank symptoms of schizophrenia, it becomes a luxury to rule their own thoughts. Kandinsky-Clerambault syndrome is characterized by pseudo-hallucinations, delusions of control, telepathy, thought broadcasting and thought insertion by an external force. The patient’s thoughts, emotions, perceptions or actions are under the control of a different agent, or sometimes he believes that the operator of control is inside his body.
Presentation of a clinical case of Kandinsky-Clerambault syndrome in a patient with treatment-resistant schizophrenia.
Case report
We present the case of a 38-year-old man, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia since 2014, who has followed several therapeutic plans, starting with Haloperidol followed by Risperidone, Paliperidone, Quetiapine, Clozapine. Since 2016 he had been under treatment with Xeplion injectable 150mg/month ambulatory, but the psychotic features never fully remitted. 10 days before admission he had last administration of Xeplion LAI. The patient reports the loss of control over his mental life and describes the triple automatism: ideo-verbal, sensory and motor. “There are some people in my body who control me, they move my limbs. I feel like my body is not mine.” He describes imperative and commentative auditory pseudo-hallucinations. The patient speaks intermittently in the 3rd person about himself, has circumstantial discourse, with elements of tangentiality, ideo-verbal and conceptual disorganization. He presents delusions of control, persecution and prejudice. The treatment received during admission – Riseridone 5ml/day, Amisulpride 600mg/day, Orfiril Long 1000mg/day.
After 14 days of hospitalization, the patient is discharged in an improved state, without mentioning spontaneously the delusional ideation. He affirms the intermittent presence of auditory pseudo-hallucinations, but with low intensity compared to the moment of admission. It is ironic how the loss of the self, along with the insertion of thoughts and auditory pseudo-hallucinations create a patient’s own reality, which at the same time is experienced as coming from the outside. From a phenomenological point of view, thought insertion is explained as an autoimmune disease. Thoughts are produced by our mind, but because we have lost the meaning of control and belonging to ourselves, those thoughts are attacked as foreign.
None Declared
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.