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Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci (2014) 264:363365 DOI 10.1007/s00406-014-0507-7
EDITORIAL
Historical aspects of Mozarts mental health and diagnostic insights of ADHD and personality disorders
Andrea Schmitt Peter Falkai
Published online: 1 June 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
In the last decades, psychiatrists ascribed diverse psychiatric disorders to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, among them the Tourette syndrome. The latter primarily based on fancy erotic letters Mozart wrote to his cousin, containing excessive wordplays plus coprolalia, echolalia, or palilalia, often associated with this syndrome. To this effect, Mller [1] in his review critically scrutinizes Mozarts reported personality traits, time-typical fashion of self-expression (namely his hyperactivity), his correspondence with other persons, expressive and intentional aspects plus biography and medical history. As to language, Mller claries that vulgar speech was not only more common in the baroque than nowadays but also served the middle class as distinction from the stilted courtly language. Moreover, the writing of Tourette patients even with severe palilalia usually is uent. Mller thus judges Mozarts attitude rather as timely and evidence for his suffering from Tourette low.
Comparing the severity of nicotine dependence and smoking behavior in adult smokers with childhood attention-decit/hyperactivity disorder history (CH) versus non-CH smokers is subject of Fond et al.s [2] meta-analysis. The expected more severe smoking behavior in the CH group was only signicant before the age of 20, in adulthood again non-CH smokers drew level. The age of rst cigarette differed not signicantly, although CH smokers started earlier regularly using tobacco. Since the nding of CH probands consuming more cigarettes each day in adulthood dissolved after removing the only available
adolescent study, it needs further studies with adolescents under 20 to investigate a possible association between CH and smoking behavior. Based on consistently reported signicant comorbidity between attention-decit/hyper-activity disorder (ADHD) and affective disorders, Di Nicola et al. [3] hypothesized co-occurrence of ADHD in patients with bipolar (BD) or major depressive disorder (MDD) to be associated with more maladaptive personality traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion) plus worse clinical characteristics, outcome, and level of functioning. Comparing remitted MDD, euthymic BD patients, and healthy controls conrmed not only the close relationship between affective disorders, particularly BD, and ADHD, but also revealed a signicant association between personality traits and ADHD features, for which...