Reactive or psychogenic psychoses: the scandinavian concept

Abstract

The concept of reactive or psychogenic psychosis through most of the 20th century has been widely used in the Scandinavian countries for a major group of the so-called functional psychoses, separate from manicdepressive psychosis and schizophrenia. Psychogenic psychoses are etiologically defined as psychoses apparently caused by a mental trauma in predisposed individuals. The traumatic stress determines the content and the course of the psychotic reaction, which tend to remit in days to weeks. Since the introduction of ICD-10, the reactive psychoses have been reallocated under various diagnostic categories, mainly as acute and transient psychotic disorders with associated acute stress F23.x1, which, however, seems to be sparsely used.