Abstract
Many recent studies in psychosomatic medicine have indicated that is difficult to understand psychosomatic disorders by means of simple causality. Those studies suggested that psychosomatic disorders result from genetic factors and breaking of the network around the individual such as environmental stress and problems in their sociocultural backgrounds. The breakage of such network also brings about social maladjustments including alcohol abuse, bulimia, suicidal behaivior and conduct disorders. These disorders are all on the increase recently as psychosomatic disorders are. This indicates that there might be some relationship between psychosomatic disorders and social maladjustments.From this view point, we conducted a research on psychosomatic disorders in delinquents. We studied the health status of two hundred and seventy-five delinquents and three hundred and forty high-school students with a newly devised medical questionnaire. The mean ages of delinquents and high-school students were 17.1 years and 16.9 years respectively. The results were as follows.(1) Delinquents showed significantly higher morbidities than high-school students, not only in infectious diseases and trauma, but also in psychosomatic disorders. Those who were suffering from bronchial asthma were 5.4 percent in delinquents, 2.1 percent in high-school students. There were 4.3 percent of delinquents and 1.2 percent of high-school students who had affected by peptic ulcer. Enuresis in childhood was much more common among delinquents as compared with high-school students (15.8 percent versus 8.8 pecent).(2) Delinquents were significantly more likely to complain of physical symptoms, such as palpitation, shortness of breath and languid.These results suggested that delinquent behaviors would have connections with the development of psychosomatic disorders.
