ABSTRACT
While everyone accepts that the boundaries of schizophrenia are not well defined, its particular relationship with the other main variety of functional psychosis has been the subject of a long-running border dispute. The orthodox view, still held by many, is that schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis are separate disorders. On the other hand, there have always been some who, as described in Chapter 4, have regarded the two presentations merely as points along a continuum of psychosis, and this is currently a respectable, even fashionable position. What both sides in the argument would accept is that patients exist who show combinations of schizophrenic and affective symptomatology, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes at different points in the same episode of illness, and sometimes at widely separated points in time.
