ABSTRACT
This chapter lists the major positive symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Patients grouped in terms of specific cognitive deficits should also share abnormalities at the physiological level. The chapter introduces a concept that is very central to my own account of positive symptoms: self-monitoring. If hallucinations are caused by inner speech, then the problem is not that inner speech is occurring, but that patients must be failing to recognise that this activity is self-initiated. There are a number of other positive symptoms of schizophrenia that explicitly concern the attribution of the patient's own actions to outside agents. Hoffman proposes that schizophrenic speech appears incoherent because words and phrases that are unrelated to the theme of the conversation are inserted randomly into the patient's speech. Self-monitoring of speech can be studied directly by asking people to remember whether they said something or not. Patients with signs and symptoms meeting all the criteria for schizophrenia are sometimes found to have clear-cut organic illnesses.
