Disorganized schizophrenia

Disorganized schizophrenia, or hebephrenia, is an obsolete term for a subtype of schizophrenia. It is no longer recognized as a separate condition in DSM-5 and ICD-11, published in 2013 and 2022, respectively. It was originally proposed by the German psychiatrist Ewald Hecker in the 1870s.

Disorganized schizophrenia was classified up to ICD-10 as a mental and behavioural disorder, because the classification was thought to be an extreme expression of the disorganization syndrome that has been hypothesized to be one aspect of a three-factor model of symptoms in schizophrenia, the other factors being reality distortion (involving delusions and hallucinations) and psychomotor poverty (lack of speech, lack of spontaneous movement and various aspects of blunting of emotion). It is considered to have relatively poor prognosis.