The building blocks of English
Affixes
-phrenia
Also ‑phrenic.
Mental disorder.
Greek phrēn, mind.
Examples include schizophrenia (Greek skhizein, to split), a mental disorder involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour; hebephrenia (Greek hēbē, youthful beauty, because it was originally associated with behaviour in puberty), a form of chronic schizophrenia involving disordered thought, inappropriate emotions, hallucinations, and bizarre behaviour; paraphrenia (Greek para, amiss or irregular), a form of mental illness of a paranoid or schizophrenic type. Forms in ‑phrenic are either nouns indicating a person with the disorder or adjectives relating to it: schizophrenic, hebephrenic.
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