Spitz & Anaclitic Depression
In 1946, American psychiatrist René Spitz wrote "Hospitalism," a report of his experience with children in two institutional settings. He concluded that children who do not have a significant relationship with a caregiver will suffer from what he termed "anaclytic depression," a debilitating and potentially fatal disease. Spitz's seminal findings remain valid today. Contemporary sociologists and psychologists regard "hospitalism" as a form of pediatric separation disorder.
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Previous Related Studies
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Several other researchers had previously published reports that noted the adverse effects on infants and very young children of separation from mothers. These earlier studies, from 1937 through 1943, generally characterized the disorder as "maternal deprivation."
The Significance of Spitz's Study
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Spitz's study generally agreed with these earlier studies, but differed from them in two ways. Spitz gave a new name to the disorder, anaclitic depression, which effectively defined the problem as a specific psychiatric disorder, rather than a sociological finding. His study technique came as close as possible to being a double-blind study. Scientists and other academic researchers generally view the findings of a double-blind as inherently more reliable than single-source studies findings.
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Spitz's Methodology
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One problem with double-blind studies involving humans has to do with the ethical propriety of subjecting one group of humans to a condition or treatment known to be more harmful, or even less effective, than another. Spitz found a way to closely approximate a true double-blind study without ethical compromise. He studied two groups of infants and very young children in two institutional settings: a prison, and an orphanage. Both institutions provided subject children with rigorous institutional care. The children in prison received care from imprisoned mothers. The children in the orphanage received care from professional nurses.
The Results
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Spitz and his fellow researcher, Katherine Wolf, studied 123 "unselected infants" in these two settings over a period of 12 to 18 months. They noted that while the infants in the orphanage received better treatment, the infants in the prison had lower death rates. Although at the beginning of the study the orphanage infants exhibited superior development, by the end of the study they lagged behind the infants in prison. Within two years, more than a third of the orphanage infants had died. Five years later, all the prison infants remained alive.
The Implications
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Spitz and Wolfe concluded that the presence of a significant caregiver, the mothers of the children in prison, accounted for these strikingly different outcomes. They diagnosed the orphanage children as victims of anaclitic depression. By giving the syndrome a name, and elevating it from a problem to a definable disorder, they advanced pediatric psychological research. Fifty years later, the study still receives extensive citation in pediatric sociological and psychiatric studies.
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- Photo Credit crying kid image by Roman Barelko from Fotolia.com
