Around 10 percent of the population of the United States is left handed. According to a new study from Yale University, people who are left hand dominant are more likely to be diagnosed with the mental illness known as schizophrenia than people who are right handed.
Around 10 percent of the population of the United States is left handed.
According to a new study from Yale University, people who are left hand dominant are more likely to be diagnosed with the mental illness known as schizophrenia than people who are right handed.
Jadon Webb, a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at the Yale University Child Study Center, who worked on the research said: “People with psychosis are those who have lost touch with reality in some way, through hallucinations, delusions, or false beliefs, and it is notable that this symptom constellation seems to correlate with being left-handed.”
The study involved 107 people on outpatient treatment from a public psychiatric clinic, and asked them a very basic question of which was their writing hand, in an effort to find any biomarkers that might have a correlation with mental illness.
About 40 percent of the patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia are left handed, compared with 11 percent of patients with mood disorders like depression, which is closer to the percentage of lefties in the entire population.
The survey was reportedly designed to be easily understood by the participants, many of whom are from underprivileged backgrounds.
