Temporal persistence of anomalous self-experience: A 5years follow-up

The concept of self-disorders in schizophrenia has gained substantial interest and it has now been established empirically that self-disorders aggregate in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders but not in other mental disorders or in healthy controls. Yet, the issue of temporal persistence has not been addressed.

The aim of this study is to examine the temporal persistence of self-disorders.

96 first admission patients were thoroughly assessed for psychopathology including SD at baseline and again 5years later. We created a 25-item self-disorder scale which was used both at baseline and follow-up to assess self-disorders. The scale was a pre-cursor of the later published EASE-scale. Additionally, we examined the development of positive and negative syndromes and of the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF).

There was a high correlation between self-disorders at baseline and at follow-up, and the majority of the items in self-disorders scale showed equal proportions between baseline and follow-up.

Self-disturbances showed a high level of persistence at 5-year follow-up.