Calling the emergency number: a case of schizophrenia

Abstract

This article tells the story of a psychiatric patient who, despite her normal behaviour and a symptomatology which showed none of the symptoms listed in DSM for the diagnosis of schizophrenia, caused an unpleasant feeling of extraneity in the psychiatrist who visited her. The physician noticed that the patient’s mental state had the so called specific schizophrenic nuance and induced what H.C. Rümke in 1941 called praecoxfeeling (Praecoxgefühl): the perception of an indefinable attribute that envelops all the observed symptoms. In this case it helped the clinician make the right diagnosis.