Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 20, 2026

Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
Published on: October 28, 2020
Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire
1European Institute of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, UK. j.larsen@surrey.ac.uk
Abstract:
The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them.
Related Concept Videos
Psychosis: Goals of Pharmacotherapy
Psychosis and Antipsychotic Drugs: Overview
Psychological and Sociocultural Causes of Schizophrenia
Psychosis: Pathophysiology of Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders
Researchers have identified genetic factors that increase susceptibility to schizophrenia, underscoring the intricate interplay between genetics and environment in disease development. At the core of schizophrenia's pathophysiology is excessive dopaminergic neurotransmission within the...
Self Within Cultural Contexts
Positive Symptoms Schizophrenia: Hallucinations and Delusions
Hallucinations
Hallucinations in...

