"Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self" Twenty Years Later: Revisiting the Ipseity-Disturbance Model and the Developmental Nature of Self-Disorder in the Schizophrenia Spectrum.
Schizophrenia bulletin – May 25, 2025
Source: PubMed
Summary
Subtle disturbances in self-experience may precede schizophrenia by years, offering crucial insights into early detection. Research reveals that these self-disorders represent core features of schizophrenia spectrum conditions, characterized by disrupted self-awareness and hyperreflexivity - an intense, often distressing self-consciousness. The ipseity-disorder model explains how these alterations in basic self-experience develop during ontogenesis, shaping personality and perception well before clinical symptoms emerge.
Abstract
Self-disorders (SD) designate a pattern of non-psychotic anomalous self-experiences, which specifically aggregate in clinical and subclinical forms of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), including familial high-risk configurations. SD have been corroborated as a valuable, quantitatively tractable, trait phenotype for indexing genetic liability to SSD, and, as a risk phenotype, they offer critical insights into the nature of these complex conditions which precede and shape the development of more overt clinical manifestations (including schizotypal features and positive, negative, and disorganized symptoms). In the last three decades, the concept of self-disorders has evolved from early clinical observations to a well-defined research domain, offering a nuanced understanding of schizophrenia spectrum vulnerabilities and holding promise for improving diagnostic accuracy, enhancing prognostic assessments, offering novel targets for intervention, and advancing our understanding of the schizophrenia spectrum.