Oxford JournalsMedicine & Health Schizophrenia Bulletin Volume 34, Issue 6Pp. 1151-1162.
Hypothesis: Grandiosity and Guilt Cause Paranoia; Paranoid Schizophrenia is a Psychotic Mood Disorder; a Review
Charles Raymond Lake1,2
+ Author Affiliations
2Department of Psychiatry, University of Kansas Medical Center, 3901 Rainbow Boulevard, Kansas City, KS 66160-7341
1To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 816-678-4848, fax: 913-588-1310, e-mail: clake@kumc.edu.
Abstract
Delusional paranoia has been associated with severe mental illness for over a century. Kraepelin introduced a disorder called “paranoid depression,” but “paranoid” became linked to schizophrenia, not to mood disorders. Paranoid remains the most common subtype of schizophrenia, but some of these cases, as Kraepelin initially implied, may be unrecognized psychotic mood disorders, so the relationship of paranoid schizophrenia to psychotic bipolar disorder warrants reevaluation. To address whether paranoia associates more with schizophrenia or mood disorders, a selected literature is reviewed and 11 cases are summarized. Comparative clinical and recent molecular genetic data find phenotypic and genotypic commonalities between patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder lending support to the idea that paranoid schizophrenia could be the same disorder as psychotic bipolar disorder. A selected clinical literature finds no symptom, course, or characteristic traditionally considered diagnostic of schizophrenia that cannot be accounted for by psychotic bipolar disorder patients. For example, it is hypothesized here that 2 common mood-based symptoms, grandiosity and guilt, may underlie functional paranoia. Mania explains paranoia when there are grandiose delusions that one's possessions are so valuable that others will kill for them. Similarly, depression explains paranoia when delusional guilt convinces patients that they deserve punishment. In both cases, fear becomes the overwhelming emotion but patient and physician focus on the paranoia rather than on underlying mood symptoms can cause misdiagnoses. This study uses a clinical, case-based, hypothesis generation approach that warrants follow-up with a larger representative sample of psychotic patients followed prospectively to determine the degree to which the clinical course observed herein is typical of all such patients. Differential diagnoses, nomenclature, and treatment implications are discussed because bipolar patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia are severely misserved.
Introduction
Modern psychiatry began in the mid- to late 19th century when several syndromes including paranoia were consolidated by Emil Kraepelin and called dementia praecox,1 later renamed “schizophrenia” by Eugene Bleuler in 1911.2 The “Kraepelinian dichotomy” described 2 separate diseases to explain severe mental illness, schizophrenia and manic-depressive insanity or bipolar disorder.1 Bleuler2 and then Schneider3 emphasized that psychosis, to include a paranoid delusional system, was pathognomonic of schizophrenia and discounted the diagnostic implications of mood symptoms. A very different idea was presented in 1905 when Specht4 said that all psychoses were derived from mood abnormalities.5 Kraepelin had also linked paranoia and mood when he used the term “paranoid depression” to describe an illness with a high rate of suicide, severe depression, paranoia, and auditory hallucinations.1,5 The 1933 introduction of schizoaffective disorder6 recognized the diagnostic relevance of mood symptoms in psychotic patients, linked schizophrenia (psychosis) and mood disorders, and eroded the concept of the Kraepelinian dichotomy.7–11 Some now consider schizoaffective disorder to be a psychotic mood disorder and not a subtype of schizophrenia or a separate disorder.7–12 In addition, certain authors in the United Kingdom have associated paranoia with depression and delusional guilt.5 One group in the 1970s implied that about 95% of their sample of patients diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia actually suffered from mania because “classic bipolar” patients were observed to suffer paranoid delusions.13
Despite these linkages of paranoia and psychosis with mood disorders, the concepts of Bleuler2 and Schneider3 that bound paranoia and all functional psychoses to schizophrenia prevailed, and such cases typically have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia or postschizophrenic depression, not as psychotic mood disorders.5 Paranoia continues to be associated with schizophrenia, rather than with bipolar disorder, both as the most common subtype and as a core diagnostic symptom, as reflected in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition (ICD-10), and major textbooks of psychiatry.14
However, when mood disorders are explored as a source of paranoia, a different causal relationship presents itself (figure 1). If psychotic mood disorders explain many paranoid presentations, as suspected over 30 years ago,13 questions arise about the distinction between schizophrenia and psychotic mood disorders.7,8,13,15–19Selected reviews of symptoms, course, prognosis, family heritability, and epidemiology conclude that there are no disease-specific characteristics of schizophrenia and that the DSM diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia are common to psychotic bipolar disorder patients.7,8,15–20 Further indications of closure toward one disease derive from recent basic science data, especially molecular genetic and neurocognitive studies, that show considerable overlap and similarities between schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder.18–32 One author states that “ … of the (11) chromosome loci found for the transmission of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, eight have been found to overlap ....”28 Crow30,31 advances an explanation for the 3 or more loci that do not overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar that is compatible with a single disease to explain all 3 of the functional psychoses: “Epigenetic variation associated with chromosomal rearrangements that occurred in the hominid lineage and that relates to the evolution of language could account for predisposition to schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder and failure to detect such variation by standard linkage approaches.”
Psychotic Depression Can Cause Delusions of Exaggerated Severity of Past “Sins” Leading to Delusional Guilt. Such guilt stimulates thoughts that punishment is deserved and imminent. The fear of punishment, torture, and/or execution defines the paranoid psychosis that consumes these patients’ lives. Similarly, psychotic mania can cause delusional grandiosity of ownership of valuable possessions. A logical result is the delusional belief that others want these possessions and are going to kill to get them, leading to paranoid psychosis. Because these patients present with complaints of fear for their lives, the core symptoms of the mood disorder may be overlooked and a misdiagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia made.
There are established differences between psychotic and nonpsychotic bipolar disorders.15–17 Psychotic mood disorders are often phenotypically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, so it is likely that psychotic mood-disordered patients have been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Differences considered to exist between “schizophrenia” and “classic” (nonpsychotic) bipolar disorder may be explained by the differences between psychotic and nonpsychotic (classic) bipolar.
The symptom of paranoia, in particular, has been the focus of genetic studies. For example, although preliminary, familial aggregation data reveal that paranoid delusional proneness is an endophenotype common to patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder but not nonpsychotic bipolar disorder.16 Schulze et al17 extended this work by linking persecutory delusions (paranoia) to variance at a specific locus, the D-amino acid oxidase activator/G30, located on chromosome 13q34, in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and with psychotic bipolar disorder. More recent results link this locus primarily to mood disorders “across the traditional bipolar and schizophrenia categories.”29 Such genotypic overlap, when considered with the phenotypic similarities, suggests the hypothesis that the disease called paranoid schizophrenia may be psychotic bipolar disorder and not a separate disorder. Bipolar disorder is more likely than schizophrenia to be the single disease because bipolar is scientifically grounded with unique, disease-specific diagnostic criteria, while schizophrenia has no disease-specific criteria.7,12,15 The following review of 11 patients, each initially diagnosed with schizophrenia but subsequently revealed to suffer from a psychotic mood disorder, serves to illustrate these ideas (table 1). All subjects gave their written informed consent to participate in this Institutional Review Board-approved research.
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Case 1
A 58-year-old Vietnam veteran living in a suburban neighborhood was presented to the emergency department (ED) in handcuffs accompanied by police. He reported to the interviewing psychiatrist that he had nailed shut his doors and windows except for small slits through which he “planned to fire on attacking Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives.” Having amassed numerous small arms weapons including an illegal, fully automatic machine gun, he brought attention to himself by spraying automatic gunfire through his attic because he thought that “they had gotten into the attic.”
The patient's behavior and resistance in the ED necessitated involuntary commitment. On the unit, he was agitated and fearful, avoiding eye contact, any communication, and taking anything by mouth because he feared he would be poisone