Premorbid personality of depressive, bipolar, and schizophrenic patients with special reference to suicidal issues

The personalities of 6,315 Swiss conscripts of the army were assessed in 1971 by the Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI), together with social attributes and consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Up to 1983, 185 psychiatric patients were identified who were treated as inpatients or outpatients in the same geographic area. A subsample of 87 patients were chosen for a blind diagnostic study applying Feighner criteria to the records. Their premorbid personalities are compared to controls from the same group. The results are preliminary, the diagnostic groups are small. The schizophrenics scored high in autonomic lability. The bipolar patients did not deviate significantly in any personality dimension from the controls. They differed significantly from the unipolar depressives by a lower aggression score. Unipolar depressives scored high in aggression and in autonomic lability. The same was true for the sociopaths. Aggression scores were also high in those who committed suicide or died by accidents. Independent of the diagnostic classification, subjects with suicidal attempts scored high in aggression, whereas subjects with suicidal ideation scored low in aggression.