[Age-delusion: (age-misidentification of chronic schizophrenic patients)]

I noted that some of the schizophrenic patients chronically institutionalized at our hospital mistook their age (age-delusion), and studied the primary symptoms and the psychodynamics of this schizophrenic phenomenon. The subjects were divided into a core group of 24 patients who had schizophrenia without any overt organic brain diseases and a peripheral group of 8 patients who had schizophrenia associated with organic brain diseases. I divided the core group patients into 3 categories. I. Underestimators: These patients insisted that they were much younger than their real age, and they could be divided into a dynamic subgroup (subjective age increased in parallel with time) and a static subgroup (subjective aging did not occur). II. Overestimators: these patients believed that they were much older than their real age. III. Vacillators: These patients sometimes underestimated and sometimes overestimated their age. They could be divided into a subgroup in which the age was decided on the basis of their systematic delusions and a subgroup in which one of two fixed and different ages was always given (one being over and the other under the real age). I compared these schizophrenic age-delusional patients to other organic brain disease patients without schizophrenia who also mistook their age. Organic brain disease patients had a temporal recognition disorder as their primary symptom, while the schizophrenic patients had abnormal time experience as the primary symptom. This abnormality of time experience, mixed with the patient's psychodynamics that they want to objectify and manipulate their age as a number, appeared as a discrepancy between the subjective length of hospitalization and the actual duration, which means the age-delusion. These schizophrenic age-delusional patients had lost the essential 'Zeitlichkeit' and shut themselves up in the unessential 'Zeitlichkeit' according to the concept of Heidegger. Believing in their subjective age seems to allow them to reunify or rewrite their own past history and gain some hope for the future.