ABSTRACT

In Table 1.2 I listed the major positive symptoms associated with schizophrenia. These all concern abnormal experiences which the patient describes as best he can. Example 5.1 indicates how some of these experiences are typically labelled. By their nature, psychotic experiences are so unusual that patients find them very difficult to describe. For example, Patricia Ruocchio (1991) in her first person account, says, “There are things that happened to me that I have never found words for, some lost now, some which I still search desperately to explain ...”. It is therefore necessary to be very cautious in interpreting these descriptions in terms of underlying cognitive abnormalities.