Folie a trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel

Folie a trois (madness for three) is a rare disorder characterized by the shared paranoid delusions of three individuals. Two case reports of folie a trois in two different Russian-Jewish families who had immigrated to Israel in the 1970s are presented. In the first, a 45-year-old single man, living with his elderly parents, was hospitalized after attacking a psychiatrist. He believed that he and his family were being terrorized by his mother's sister. His parents supported his claim, and his mother insisted that her sister was an Israeli agent plotting to kill her son. His mother had been born in a Russian ghetto and at age seven, had witnessed the beheading of her father during the 1919 Civil War. The patient's father was a passive man, who always felt persecuted because he was Jewish. The family led an isolated life, had no friends, and survived on social security. Treatment with antipsychotic medication and separation from his family had no effect on the son's paranoid belief system. In the second case, a Russian-Jewish 39-year-old single woman still living with her parents claimed that a neighbor was pouring poison gas into their apartment. Both parents supported her claim. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and treated with antipsychotic medication. After she was hospitalized several times, her family moved to a new apartment, but believed that the neighbor had tracked them down and was poisoning them again. Her father had lost his first wife and two children when their home was bombed during World War II. Both her mother and father had suffered a great deal of persecution while living in Russia. The development of folie a trois in these families appears to have been related to past hardships, social isolation, and dependent family relations. Both families seemed unable to adjust to a society in which they were free of hostility and persecution. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)