Reflections on Saugstad's "social class, marriage, and fertility in schizophrenia"

Saugstad (1989) recently proposed a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia and manic depressive illness that emphasizes the importance of biological maturation. Early maturation is proposed to be critical to manic-depressive illness and late maturation to schizophrenia. There are three goals of the comments that follow: (1) to place the neurodevelopmental theory in a broader context of ongoing research in sex differences in psychopathology; (2) to address some conceptual ambiguities in the model, especially with respect to within-schizophrenia comparisons; and (3) to offer a suggestion for a critical test of a maturation hypothesis of schizophrenia.