Personal Account: Snapshots: The First Symptoms of Psychosis

First person account: a personal experience.

The article that follows is part of the Schizophrenia Bulletin's ongoing First Person Accounts series. We hope that mental health professionals—the Bulletin's primary audience—will take this opportunity to learn about the issues and difficulties confronted by consumers of mental health care. In addition, we hope that these accounts will give patients and families a better sense of not being alo...

Personal Constructions of Holiday Snapshots

Premorbid Negative Symptoms in First-Episode Psychosis

Background and Objectives: Negative symptoms emerge in many patients with psychotic disorders long before the onset of the acute illness. These symptoms are often impossible to differentiate from certain Cluster A personality traits. Methods: The current study examines the extent to which premorbid negative symptoms are contributing factors to the development of primary and secondary negative s...

Identifying persistent negative symptoms in first episode psychosis

BACKGROUND Although persistent negative symptoms (PNS) are known to contribute significantly to poor functional outcome, they remain poorly understood. We examined the heuristic value of various PNS definitions and their respective prevalence in patients with first episode psychosis (FEP). We also contrasted those definitions to the Proxy for the Deficit Syndrome (PDS) to identify deficit syndr...

Manic and depressive symptoms and insight in first episode psychosis.

Insight impairment is common early in the course of psychosis. Most studies have focused on the relationship between insight and depression, although manic symptoms are also frequent in psychoses. The main aim of this study was to examine the relationship between insight dimensions and manic and depressive symptoms in first-episode psychosis. A group of inpatients in their first psychotic episo...