Thought disorder in children and adolescents with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders

96 child and adolescent inpatients and day hospital patients, ages 6 to 18, at an urban state psychiatric hospital were rated by retrospective records review using Evaluation of Bizarre-Idiosyncratic Thinking Scale (EBIT) for the presence and severity of thought disorder in their TAT and Rorschach Inkblot Test responses. Data was obtained from the admission summaries, psychiatric assessments and psychological testing protocols. For both the Rorschach and the TAT responses, the patients with schizophrenia and psychosis NOS had the highest levels of thought disorder. There was no general relationship between thought disorder and age, but schizophrenic patients, aged 13 and older, had more thought disorder than those schizophrenic patients who were younger than 13.