[Season and psychiatric disease (author's transl)]

Clinical experience shows that certain psychiatric patients have to be hospitalized more frequently during certain periods of the year. We compared the data of the hospitalisation of 17268 psychiatric patients, hospitalized over a period of 13 years (1956-1969) with the time of the year. Schizophrenics are hospitalized mostly during the warm period, least during the cold period, regardless of their sex. The same can be said about the diagnostic subgroups (paranoics, catatonics, hebephrenics, schizophrenia simplex) and the periodic depressions and depressions of involution. Reactive and neurotic depressions and depressions of exhaustion, neurotics (crisis during puberty, neuroses of character, obsessional and anxiety neuroses), arteriosclerotics and psychopaths do not show an even pattern of distribution. Male alcoholics, too, do not show a maximum of admissions. Female alcoholics are admitted more during the warm periods, less often during the cold periods. Drug addicts, too, show a minimum in winter, an even level over the rest of the time of the year. It is suggested that the patterns of admissions for certain psychiatric patients are to be explained by the different sensibility of meteorological factors.