Medicine: 6 & 14 Syndrome

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When Steve was a year old, his mother ran away. Until he was seven he seemed happy with his grandparents on the East coast; then his father took him to the Southwest to live with a middle-aged female cousin. Steve was active in Boy Scouts and church groups, and he idealized good sportsmanship and a high ethical code. But he complained that his cousin-guardian nagged him about such things as getting shirts dirty. When he was 15, Steve beat and stabbed her to death.

At University Hospitals in Madison, Wis., Psychiatrist Sherwyn M. Woods took a series of encephalograms and found them normal except for one thing: the brain-wave pattern showed high peaks, at rates of 6 and 14 per second. Existence of this "6 and 14 dysrhythmia" has been known for only a decade. While its significance is still disputed, Dr. Woods believes that it is often a sign of a personality disorder, virtually confined to children and adolescents, that he calls the "6 and 14 syndrome." Most victims seem to be average or exceptionally "good" children until they are picked up for setting fires, sexual aggression, and other crimes of violence. In most of twelve murders committed by 6-14 cases, the victim was the mother or, as in Steve's case, a substitute for her.

Brain researchers think that they have traced the 6-14 peaks to an abnormality in the lower brain—either in the thalamus or the hypothalamus. This may be the result of heredity, head injury or brain inflammation. Describing Steve's case and another like it in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Woods does not suggest that the brain abnormality is the cause of violence. He reasons by analogy with epilepsy that victims must have both the abnormality and the emotional disturbance to provoke an attack.

In Steve's and similar cases, says Dr. Woods, the emotional trouble was inability to find a socially acceptable safety valve for aggressive impulses stemming from disturbed sexuality. The brain abnormality, he suggests, may constitute a biological stress that enhances the aggression. He is confident that the brain abnormality does not induce the aggressiveness, or vice versa. Either can exist without the other. Fortunately—since no effective treatment is known—the 6 and 14 syndrome seems to fade out at the end of adolescence.