Making sense of schizophrenic symptoms; delusional statements and behavior may be functional in purpose

The present paper describes the use of a functional analysis in attempting to make sense of symptomatic delusional statements and behaviors that people diagnosed with schizophrenia present. The three categories that are used to classify symptoms are: (1) positive reinforcement function, (2) negative reinforcement function, and (3) mislabeling of private events. The paper presents a number of clinical cases whose symptoms are representative of each category. Each case is then functionally treated as a result of its "category" characteristics, thus basing treatment on the hypothesized function (or reason) for the symptom.