[Early childhood psychosis versus early childhood autism? Differential diagnosis based on one week observation in an inpatient setting].

We report on the case of a 4-year old child suffering for the past six months from a lingering psychotic development. Several months of outpatient observation did not permit a clear differential diagnosis of either childhood autism or an early psychosis. During a one-week inpatient stay at our hospital recurring productive-psychotic episodes were observed that finally led to the exclusion of the diagnosis of "childhood autism" (ICD-10 F 84.0 (Dilling et al., 1993)) and to the diagnosis of "other disintegrative childhood disorder" (ICD-10: F 84.3 (Dilling et al., 1993)).