Conversations with chronic schizophrenic patients.

An account is given of some of the topics discussed during a small informal weekly open group meeting of chronic schizophrenic patients, based on occasional notes compiled over eleven years. The main feature of the patients' condition as displayed was poverty--clinical, social, behavioural, material and financial--and certain features suggested an organic aetiology. Reasons are given for considering that the patients' condition was predominantly caused by schizophrenia rather than by institutionalism.