hebephrenia
- noun
- /ˌhiːbəˈfrɛnɪə/
- Specialized
- During her research, she found that hebephrenia can cause young patients to act inappropriately, similar to children.
Examples
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The psychiatrist explained that hebephrenia often manifests in adolescents through disorganized thoughts and childish behavior.
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Schizophrenia was noted to come in four different forms, including hebephrenia, where patients were so deteriorated they smeared feces on the walls.
Blog text (6) -
Symptoms of hebephrenia include erratic behavior and difficulty in maintaining a coherent thought process in teenagers.
Synonyms
A serious mental illness that makes people lose touch with reality, for example hearing things that are not real
A serious mental illness where a person loses touch with reality and talks or thinks in a confused way
A serious mental illness that makes people lose contact with reality and withdraw from others
A mental illness where thoughts are confused and behavior is childlike, starting in teenage years
A severe mental illness that causes confused thinking, strange behavior, and childlike actions starting in the late teens
A severe mental illness with confused thinking, strange speech, and childish behavior that often starts in the teenage years
Surface Forms
Morphology
hebephrenia = hebe + phren + ia
The term is a specialized medical formation from Greek combining forms ('hebe-' youth + 'phren-' mind) plus the noun-forming suffix '-ia', which is not transparent to an average B1 learner.
Etymology
The word hebephrenia comes from Greek parts hebe meaning 'youth' and phren meaning 'mind', the same phren you see in schizophrenia. So hebephrenia is like a disorder of the 'young mind', which helps explain why it often begins in the teenage years with disorganized or childlike behavior.