Simple schizophrenia revisited: Its schizophrenic body image deviation

Simple schizophrenia has not yet been recognized as a well-established diagnostic category as one of the subtypes of schizophrenia, however, its inclusion to the official diagnostic system is regarded as urgent for early intervention. Here, we report our new observation that body image distortion uniquely found in typical schizophrenia, as reflected in the perception of mass of flesh of living objects in the whole or part of the Rorschach stimuli (Koide et al., 2002), was shown in the patients conforming to the original description of simple schizophrenia, to revisit its relatedness to schizophrenia from a cognitive and perceptual point of view. The Rorschach test was administered to four inpatients of a local mental hospital, showing social and occupational decline, negative symptoms and absence of positive symptoms. The presence or absence of Rorschach flesh mass body image percepts was examined. All of four patients revealed Rorschach mass of flesh responses. The fact that simple schizophrenia exhibited the same body image distortion in the flesh mass passive global perception with typical schizophrenia suggests the adequacy of reconsidering simple schizophrenia as a form of schizophrenia.