Nearly forty percent of hospitalized schizophrenic men are overtly preoccupied with death

Evidence

Clinical observations verify that schizophrenics suffer from an overriding fear of, or persistent ruminations about, death. One study of 205 hospitalized schizophrenic men found that 80 patients were overtly preoccupied with death, and that death fears coincided with the onset of the schizophrenic symptoms or with times when the symptoms were magnified. So when Pat wondered in his journal what truth people were afraid of, and whether “they themselves are not what they think themselves to be,” he was beating around the psychological bush. In fact, he was getting as close as he could to identifying death as the worm at the core of the human experience, including his own. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 692

Categorization

• QUESTION: What year and facility produced this 205-patient study, and is the 39% figure replicated elsewhere?
• SHARE: A specific schizophrenia-research colleague would want this 80-of-205 death-preoccupation statistic.