恋人を発端者として出現した感応精神病の一例

抄録

In this communication, the present authors have studied on a case of the submissive female partner of induced psychosis, of which her lover was the dominant partner and she developed an identical psychophathology to the partner after having been influenced by his psychotic state.
The dominant partner (proband) was 21-year-old male student and he had some delusions of possession, that he was possessed by fox and ox, with ideas of persecution, and he was involved in religious activities. He was suspected as paranoid type of schizophrenia in the psychiatric interview, but the diagnosis was not confirmed because he refused to take either further examinations or psychological testings.
The submissive partner, who was a 21- year-old female and working in an insurance company, at first made a tout resistance to his delusional ideas, but she was gradually influenced by her lover's psychotic state, particularly after she became interested in spiritual phenomina. Finally she became to share the delusions and the common ideas with him after their cohabitation for several days. The cohabitation was forcibly discontinued by her father, and she was seperated from him, but her state of possession remained unchanged therafter until her emergency admission to our university hospital. Almost complete remission from her psychotic state was after two months' treatment in our inpatient ward.
In the present case, the persistent repetitions of unitary spiritual idea by the dominant partner and the entire dependence due to love relationship of the submissive partner appear to be the most important factors for induction of the psychotic state. Recently, spiritual phenomena have come into nation-wide fashion and a large number of people seem to have special interests in the spiritual world etc., so that the possible prevalence of "spiritually"induced psychoses including folie A deux might be expected more frequently among adolescence in particular.