Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2009 35(6):1034-1036; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp043
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Silencing the Self: Schizophrenia as a Self-disturbance
2 Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Undergraduate, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TD, UK
Keywords: positive symptoms / self-consciousness / existentialism
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
| Introduction |
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I have written this article from my personal experiences of schizophrenia as fundamentally a self-disturbance and not simply a biochemical imbalance. In the article, I attempt to use a theory of "existential permeability" to explain the various symptoms of the condition and how psychiatrists could help in recognizing the patient's self-disturbance.
| The Disordered Self in Schizophrenia: A Personal Perspective |
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If you ask a psychiatrist about the role of the patient's self in schizophrenia, you will probably get a very confused look. At least this is my experience. After all, to many psychiatrists, schizophrenia is a disorder of thought and perception that has a strong biochemical basis. Symptoms are classified and categorized into positive, negative, and cognitive aspects, and although each individual sufferer might have a different clinical profile, the clinician's response remains pretty much the same: to prescribe antipsychotic medications. Indeed, medications can and do help with many of the frightening and distressing symptoms of schizophrenia, but they
| Existential Permeability and the Disordered Self |
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1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: +44-(0)-117-3311465, fax: +44-(0)-117-3312288, e-mail: ck7515@bristol.ac.uk