Psychiatric patients at internal medicine clinics

Pure psychiatric patients at an internal medicine clinic were studied to obtain the basic information about this relatively-unexplored "frontier" of psychiatry. Among 527 fresh cases examined in two years, 8.2% were psychiatric ones; neurotic cases comprised 4.0%, depressive cases 2.1% and schizophrenic cases 1.7%. About half of the pure psychiatric patients came with hypochondriacal complaints, psychotic or neurotic. The most typical cases in terms of age and sex were a male neurotic in his 30's and a female schizophrenic in her 40's. More psychiatric patients revisit the clinic than do medical patients. The revisiting rate was highest among the depressives. Some Japanese and overseas data were compared with the author's data.