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Some social and phenomenological characteristics of psychotic immigrants1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Roland Littlewood  and
Maurice Lipsedge
Roland Littlewood*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, Guy's Hospital, London, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
Maurice Lipsedge
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, Guy's Hospital, London, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
*
2Address for correspondence: Dr R. Littlewood, Wolfson College, Oxford OX2 6UD.
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Synopsis

Various studies have shown: (i) increased rates of psychoses in immigrants to Britain, and a particularly high rate of schizophrenia in the West Indian- and West African-born; and (ii) a greater proportion of atypical psychoses in immigrants. A retrospective study of psychotic inpatients from a London psychiatric unit demonstrated increased rates of schizophrenia in patients from the Caribbean and West Africa. These patients included a high proportion of those with paranoid and religious phenomenology, those with frequent changes of diagnosis, formal admissions, and married women. The West Indian-born had been in Britain for nearly 10 years before first seeing a psychiatrist and, if they had an illness with religious symptomatology, were likely to have been in hospital for only 3 weeks. Rates of schizophrenia without paranoid phenomenology were similar in each ethnic group. It is suggested that the increase in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the West Indian- born, and possibly in the West African-born, may be due in part to the occurrence of acute psychotic reactions which are diagnosed as schizophrenia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , May 1981 , pp. 289 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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Footnotes

1

An interim report of this study was presented at the International Congress of Transcultural Psychiatry, Bradford, England, 1976.

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