ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on what is known about the psychiatric difficulties in adult life of the whole group of schizoid children seen over the years, 115 boys and 34 girls, from whom those who were personally interviewed had been drawn. All were aged over 16 at the time. The focus will be on comparisons of the use of psychiatric hospital services by schizoid and control children in later life, and of frequencies of recorded suicide attempts and of deaths attributable to suicide in these groups. There were in fact two boys among the group as whole who had caused concern in childhood because of a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia when they were first seen. Their most worrying symptoms at that time had been hallucinations and delusions. As it turned out, these were transitory in both cases and neither boy developed any more serious psychiatric illness by the time of the follow-up, when they were 34 and 35 years old respectively.
