TITLE:
An Investigation of the Secular Acceleration of Psychiatric Disorders
AUTHORS:
Sebastian Lemke, Sunka De Vries
KEYWORDS:
Acceleration, Secular
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Psychiatry,
Vol.5 No.1,
January
30,
2015
ABSTRACT: Secular acceleration, for
example an increase in height in groups of people over a period of time of more
than a century, is a unique, perhaps “ecological” event. In the study presented
here, historical patient files from the Jena Psychiatric Clinic were evaluated
in relation to the problem of acceleration. A first sampling of 119 patient
files for the years 1880-1890 revealed that, for children and adolescents up
until the end of their twentieth year of life, the average age at the time of
their first admission was 17 years. Compared to this, the first admission of a
second sample of 132 patient records for the years 1985-1987 revealed a clearly
younger average age at first admission of 11 years. This difference in age was
found to be statistically significant. The heights of 14-year-old subjects from
the city of Jena for the years 1880 to 1975 obtained from the literature showed
a documented increase in height of almost 20 cm. The results of our
investigation revealed that, in addition to physical acceleration, there was
also an advancement of pathological mental processes in the course of a period
of 100 years.