Linking narrative identity with schizotypal personality disorder features in adolescents

Adolescents with schizotypal personality disorder (STPD) features such as odd thinking and bizarre fantasies may have difficulty developing effective life narratives. Their autobiographical memories likely will include aberrant, stressful experiences that are difficult to integrate into a cohesive, healthy sense of self. Moreover, these adolescents are likely to face relationship difficulties with both family members and peers who typically play an important role in narrative identity formation. We examined the link between STPD features and narrative identity in adolescence. Dutch community-dwelling adolescents, 125 with high-STPD features and 1,417 with low-STPD features, wrote life narratives about a turning point in their lives. These narratives were coded for a variety of features including the theme of agency, self-event connections, redemption sequences, and Cluster A- and STPD-like symptom descriptions. We found that the turning point narratives of adolescents with high STPD trait levels were significantly less likely to be agentic and redemptive, but more likely to contain Cluster A- and STPD-like symptom descriptions than the narratives of adolescents with low STPD trait levels. However, there were no significant associations of STPD trait levels with self-event connections. All the findings were robust and consistent. The current study demonstrated that early emerging personality disturbances may manifest themselves in aspects of personality other than traits-specifically, in the narratives young people are developing about important experiences in their lives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).