Felix Post

Bio: Felix Post is an academic researcher from Bethlem Royal Hospital. The author has contributed to research in topics: Psychological testing & Psychopathology. The author has an hindex of 19, co-authored 43 publications receiving 1828 citations.

Creativity and psychopathology. A study of 291 world-famous men.

Abstract: Background This investigation sought to determine the prevalences of various psychopathologies in outstandingly creative individuals, and to test a hypothesis that the high prevalence of mental abnormalities reported in prominent living creative persons would not be found in those who had achieved and retained world status. Method The family background, physical health, personality, psychosexuality and mental health of 291 famous men in science, thought, politics, and art were investigated. The membership of the six series of scientists and inventors, thinkers and scholars, statesmen and national leaders, painters and sculptors, composers, and of novelists and playwrights was determined by the availability of sufficiently adequate biographies. Extracted data were transformed into diagnoses in accordance with DSM–III–R criteria, when appropriate. Results All excelled not only by virtue of their abilities and originality, but also of their drive, perseverance, industry, and meticulousness. With a few exceptions, these men were emotionally warm, with a gift for friendship and sociability. Most had unusual personality characteristics and, in addition, minor ‘neurotic’ abnormalities were probably more common than in the general population. Severe personality deviations were unduly frequent only in the case of visual artists and writers. Functional psychoses were probably less frequent than psychiatric epidemiology would suggest, and they were entirely restricted to the affective varieties. Among other functional disorders, only depressive conditions, alcoholism, and, less reliably, psychosexual problems were more prevalent than expected in some professional categories, but strikingly so in writers. Conclusions Similar findings have been reported for living artists and writers, and this suggests that certain pathological personality characteristics, as well as tendencies towards depression and alcoholism, are causally linked to some kinds of valuable creativity.

The management and nature of depressive illnesses in late life: a follow-through study.

Abstract: The progress of 92 depressives over the age of 60 after discharge from hospital was compared with that of 81 subjects of an earlier follow-up study. On account mainly of earlier, and presumably often successful treatment in the community, the recent sample of hospital patients turned out to be more seriously and persistently ill. In spite of this, long-term results were similar to those obtained during an earlier period, possibly because of more effective after-care and maintenance therapy with anti-depressant drugs, which had in the meantime been introduced. In the after-care of elderly depressives, optional attendance at a psychiatric out-patient clinic was shown to be more practicable than, and equally efficient as, a more rigidly structured community care programme. It was possible to classify patients as severely psychotic, intermediate psychotic, or neurotic on the basis of their mental states. Patients belonging to these three groups also differed from one another in frequency of abnormalities of previous personality. Hereditary and other constitutional characteristics, as well as precipitating factors and further course were evenly distributed among patients presenting with contrasting clinical pictures, which did not, therefore, indicate the existence of different syndromes. These findings were consonant with a view according to which, in the present sample at any rate, the phenomena observed in every depressive attack are uniquely shaped by the constitutional status of the patient at the time of the attack, by the emotional significance of preceding events, and by existing strengths and weaknesses of his personality structure.

Bipolar affective disorder in old age.

Abstract: In a retrospective study of 67 elderly bipolar patients the first manic attack occurred at about age 60, often after a long period from the time of the first affective episode, after which further depressive episodes occurred. This calls into question Perris' criteria for unipolar diagnosis. Among the men, a preponderance of cerebral-organic disorders was found. The evidence for sub-classification of bipolar disorders into secondary or symptomatic manias is discussed. The recurrent nature of the illness in old age stresses the need for further evaluation of lithium prophylaxis.

Verbal creativity, depression and alcoholism. An investigation of one hundred American and British writers.

Abstract: BACKGROUND An earlier study of 291 world famous men had shown that only visual artists and creative writers were characterised, in comparison with the general population, by a much higher prevalence of pathological personality traits and alcoholism. Depressive disorders, but not any other psychiatric conditions, had afflicted writers almost twice as often as men with other high creative achievements. The present investigation was undertaken to confirm these findings in a larger and more comprehensive series of writers, and to discover causal factors for confirmed high prevalences of affective conditions and alcoholism in writers. METHOD Data were collected from post-mortem biographies and, where applicable, translated into DSM diagnoses. The frequencies of various abnormalities and deviations were compared between poets, prose fiction writers, and playwrights. RESULTS A high prevalence in writers of affective conditions and of alcoholism was confirmed. That of bipolar affective psychoses exceeded population norms in poets, who in spite of this had a lower prevalence of all kinds of affective disorders, of alcoholism, of personality deviations, and related to this, of psychosexual and marital problems, than prose fiction and play writers. CONCLUSIONS A hypothesis is developed, which links the greater frequency of affective illnesses and alcoholism in playwrights and prose writers, in comparison with poets, to differences in the nature and intensity of their emotional imagination. This hypothesis could be tested by clinical psychologists collaborating with experts in literature on random samples of different kinds of writers.

A new clinical scale for the staging of dementia.

Abstract: Accurate clinical staging of dementia in older subjects has not previously been achieved despite the use of such methods as psychometric testing, behavioural rating, and various combinations of simpler psychometric and behavioural evaluations The Clinical Dementia Rating (CRD), a global rating device, was developed for a prospective study of mild senile dementia--Alzheimer type (SDAT) Reliability, validity, and correlational data are discussed The CRD was found to distinguish unambiguously among older subjects with a wide range of cognitive function, from healthy to severely impaired

The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

Abstract: A theory is proposed to account for some of the age-related differences reported in measures of Type A or fluid cognition. The central hypothesis in the theory is that increased age in adulthood is associated with a decrease in the speed with which many processing operations can be executed and that this reduction in speed leads to impairments in cognitive functioning because of what are termed the limited time mechanism and the simultaneity mechanism. That is, cognitive performance is degraded when processing is slow because relevant operations cannot be successfully executed (limited time) and because the products of early processing may no longer be available when later processing is complete (simultaneity). Several types of evidence, such as the discovery of considerable shared age-related variance across various measures of speed and large attenuation of the age-related influences on cognitive measures after statistical control of measures of speed, are consistent with this theory.

Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: I. An improved scoring algorithm.

Abstract: In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.

The Association Between Quantitative Measures of Dementia and of Senile Change in the Cerebral Grey Matter of Elderly Subjects

Abstract: 1. The association between plaque counts in sections of cerebral cortex and measures of intellectual and personality functioning undertaken in elderly subjects during life has been studied. 2. There was no evidence that degenerative changes had contributed significantly to the causation of illness in patients with "functional" psychiatric disorders or delirious states. 3. There is a highly significant correlation between mean plaque counts and scores for dementia and performance in psychological tests. The findings suggest that psychological and pathological indices are closely related to one another, possibly through their common association with the underlying degenerative process in the brain. 4. Among severely demented subjects and those diagnosed clinically as "senile dements", correlations between psychological and pathological measures decline sharply. However, pathological differences between normal, mildly demented, and severely demented subjects appear to be of a quantitative nature. The possibility that there are qualitative differences in this group, inaccessible to present methods of examination, cannot be excluded.

Suicide as an outcome for mental disorders. A meta-analysis.

Abstract: BACKGROUND Mental disorders have a strong association with suicide. This meta-analysis, or statistical overview, of the literature gives an estimate of the suicide risk of the common mental disorders. METHOD We searched the medical literature to find reports on the mortality of mental disorders. English language reports were located on MEDLINE (1966-1993) with the search terms mental disorders', 'brain injury', 'eating disorders', 'epilepsy', 'suicide attempt', 'psychosurgery', with 'mortality' and 'follow-up studies', and from the reference lists of these reports. We abstracted 249 reports with two years or more follow-up and less than 10% loss of subjects, and compared observed numbers of suicides with those expected. A standardised mortality ratio (SMR) was calculated for each disorder. RESULTS Of 44 disorders considered, 36 have a significantly raised SMR for suicide, five have a raised SMR which fails to reach significance, one SMR is not raised and for two entries the SMR could not be calculated. CONCLUSIONS If these results can be generalised then virtually all mental disorders have an increased risk of suicide excepting mental retardation and dementia. The suicide risk is highest for functional and lowest for organic disorders with substance misuse disorders lying between. However, within these broad groupings the suicide risk varies widely.