Hallucinatory disorder: preliminary data for a clinical diagnostic proposal

Chronic hallucinatory psychosis is a psychopathological profile reported in French literature but not included in the current Anglo-American psychiatric classifications. We compared a group of patients with a clinical picture related to this syndrome to a group of patients with schizophrenia in order to evaluate the possibility of characterising hallucinatory disorder as a diagnostic entity.

Nine patients with a clinical profile related to chronic hallucinatory psychosis were compared to a group of nine patients with schizophrenia. All of the patients were clinically evaluated using the measures: SCID-P, GAF, BPRS, PANSS, SAPS, SANS, HRS-A, HRS-D, CDSS, MMSE, and CGI.

Analysis of the clinical rating scales characterised schizophrenia as comprising three dimensions (positive, negative, and disorganised symptoms), each of which contributes differently to the psychopathological profile of individual patients. However, the patients with hallucinatory disorder seemed to be mainly characterised by auditory verbal hallucinations, with relative sparing of the other functions typically altered in patients with schizophrenia.

The significant differences between the patients in the two groups seem to support the hypothesis that hallucinatory disorder may be considered as being a separate nosographic entity, in which the clinical picture is dominated by the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations.