Psychosomatic Medicine 19:307-314 (1957)
© 1957 American Psychosomatic Society

Some Psychological Concomitants of Tuberculosis and Hospitalization

A Preliminary Study

¹ Veterans Administration Hospital, Leech Farm Road, Pittsburgh, Pa.

This research was planned to study some psychological concomitants of tuberculosis and hospitalization. The variables included in the study were defensiveness, dependency, anxiety, repression, and rigidity. Subjects for the study were selected on the basis of rigorous criteria so that they would be as similar as practically possible in terms of age, education, and sex. It was hoped that a rigid selection would prevent the results from being masked by extraneous variables which an uncritical selection might introduce.

The subjects were 80 young, white, hospitalized males who were divided into four groups of 20 patients each. Two of the groups were tuberculous; two were nontuberculous. One tuberculous group and one nontuberculous group were made up of patients who had been in the hospital less than 3 months. The two remaining groups, one tuberculous and one nontuberculous, had been in the hospital more than eleven months.

The following conclusions were drawn from the results:

There is no evidence of any effect of hospitalization on the psychological variables included in this study.

The tuberculous subjects are significantly more dependent and anxious and less defensive than the nontuberculous subjects.

The observed differences in the psychological variables between the tuberculous and nontuberculous subjects are attributable to a more fundamental difference in dependency: The tuberculous subjects are significantly more dependent than the nontuberculous subjects.

The results of this study appear to be in agreement with the conclusions of previous writers and support the conclusion that a basic dependency conflict is a possible contributing factor to the development of tuberculosis.