Personal narratives and recovery from schizophrenia

It has been recently argued that recovery from schizophrenia may involve the recapturing or developing one's personal narrative. Unknown is whether the fullness of the narrative accounts of persons with schizophrenia form about their lives is indeed uniquely linked to wellness in daily life, that is, independent of other factors including symptoms, hope, self-esteem and general intellectual functioning. To explore this issue the current study correlated assessments of personal narratives using the Scale to Assess Narrative Development with the Quality of Life Scale for 103 adults with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. General assessments of personal narrative were associated with the quality and quantity of social relationships, even after controlling for positive and negative symptoms, self report of hope and self-esteem and a test of general intellectual function. The domains of social connectedness within narratives were most closely linked with frequency of social relationships and the domains of Agency and Social Worth were mostly closely linked with quality of social relationships after the effects of symptoms, hope, self-esteem and general intellectual function were accounted for statistically.