ABSTRACT
States bearing at least a passing resemblance to schizophrenia develop with some regularity in patients who have a wide range of diseases affecting brain function. When this happens, the presentation is customarily referred to as ‘organic schizophrenia’ or ‘organic schizophrenia-like state’, slightly confus-ingly in view of the presumptive biological aetiology of schizophrenia itself. A further layer of complexity is added by the fact that the term ‘organic’ itself has two meanings in psychiatry. The first is organic as symptomatic of underlying brain disease, and the second is organic as opposed to functional in the classification of psychotic states.
