Quoted By:
This literature even warned of the potential for missed diagnoses of malaria prior to the onset of malarial fever among psychiatric patients admitted for care and thought to be suffering from delirium and psychoses [13]. Many such patients were diagnosed with malaria only some time later at the onset of fever, or when their symptoms progressed to coma. These reports described a common prodrome of hallucinations, anxiety, crying, violence, agitation, and a dreamy and confusional state [13].
So common and diverse became the psychiatric effects attributed to both severe and mild forms of malaria during the post-WWI era, that an entire textbook, well received by psychiatrists at the time [14], was published with chapters featuring case reports of malarial psychoses, “dementia praecox”, confusional and delusional insanity, mania, “melancholia”, delirium, and dementia attributable to the disease. As noted by the author in his preface, “very few known syndromes are absent from the list apparently arising from malarial infection” [15].
By World War II (WWII), growing US and allied military experience, particularly in the South Pacific, had identified similar psychiatric effects associated with malaria. Reports from US military clinicians noted a characteristically confusional form of psychosis, as well as persecutory, grandiose, bizarre delusions, and symptoms of anxiety, depression, and mania associated with both severe and mild forms of the disease [16, 17]. Yet others had begun to challenge the true association of many of these symptoms with malaria, noting “too great a tendency to blame malaria for many of these symptoms” [16], with the temporal association of certain of these symptoms suggesting to other authors a toxic process [16].
