Frontal lobe psychopathology: mania, depression, confabulation, catatonia, perseveration, obsessive compulsions, and schizophrenia

The frontal lobes can be subdivided into major functional neuroanatomical domains, which, when injured, surgically destroyed, or reduced in activity or volume, give rise to signature pathological and psychiatric symptomology. A review of case reports and over 50 years of research, including magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and single photon emission computed tomography scans, indicates that apathy, "blunted" schizophrenia, major depression, and aphasic-perseverative disturbance of speech and thought are associated with left lateral as well as bilateral frontal (and striatal) abnormalities. Impulsiveness, confabulatory verbosity, grandiosity, increased sexuality, and mania are associated with right frontal (as well as bilateral) disturbances. Gegenhalten, catatonia, and disturbances of "will" are indicative of medial frontal injuries. Disinhibitory states and obsessive-compulsive perseverative abnormalities are more frequently observed with orbital frontal lobe dysfunction, including frontal-striatal disturbances. These associations, however, are not always clear-cut as patients with the same diagnosis may demonstrate different symptoms that may be due to an additional abnormality in a different region of the brain. Moreover, as the frontal subdivisions are richly interconnected, and as frontal lobe abnormalities are not always discrete or well localized, a wide array of seemingly divergent waxing and waning symptoms may be manifest, sometimes simultaneously, including manic depression and what has been referred to as the "frontal lobe personality."