Many years ago I heard in a psychology class that there was a psychiatric disorder in which the patient exhibited something called stream of consciousness & that was defined as a rapid fire speaking of disjointed words & phrases that made no sense to anyone else. I would like to know if this information is true & if so, what is the name of the disorder(s). Thank you.

-- melinda walker (mwalker@csuniv.edu), February 03, 2003

Answers

It sounds to me like you're talking about Wernicke's aphasia in which patients have control over grammer (because Broca's area is intact) but not over semantics (because Wernicke's area is damaged).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), February 03, 2003.

It might also have referred to the phenomenon called "word salad," which is one of the "positive signs" of schizophrenia. The Synopsis of Psychiatry describes word salad as an incoherent mixture of words and phrases. Arieti, in Interpretation of Schizophrenia, cites literature indicating that "the type of aphasia that resembles most the language of regressed schizophrenia is semantic apahsia, which is a mid-way state between anomic aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia." In the Psychiatric Dictionary the emphasis is on the neologisms that characterize word salad. Thus, the clinician facing the stream of consciousness speech would be faced with differential diagnosis between schizophrenia and one of the other organic neurological disorders.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), February 04, 2003.