Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- PART I INTRODUCTION: THE EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
- PART II THE EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHOD: PROCEDURES AND ANALYSES
- PART III EXPERIENCE SAMPLING STUDIES WITH CLINICAL SAMPLES
- 7 Variability of schizophrenia symptoms
- 8 The daily life of ambulatory chronic mental patients
- 9 ‘Goofed-up’ images: thought sampling with a schizophrenic woman
- 10 The social ecology of anxiety: theoretical and quantitative perspectives
- 11 Consequences of depression for the experience of anxiety in daily life
- 12 Dysphoric moods in depressed and non-depressed adolescents
- 13 Capturing alternate personalities: the use of Experience Sampling in multiple personality disorder
- 14 Bulimia in daily life: a context-bound syndrome
- 15 Alcohol and marijuana use in adolescents' daily lives
- 16 Drug craving and drug use in the daily life of heroin addicts
- 17 Stress, coping and cortisol dynamics in daily life
- 18 Vital exhaustion or depression: a study of daily mood in exhausted male subjects at risk for myocardial infarction
- 19 Blood pressure and behavior: mood, activity and blood pressure in daily life
- PART IV THERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHOD
- PART V PSYCHIATRIC RESEARCH APPLICATIONS: PRACTICAL ISSUES and ATTENTION POINTS
- CLOSING Looking to the future
- References
- List of contributors
- Index
9 - ‘Goofed-up’ images: thought sampling with a schizophrenic woman
from PART III - EXPERIENCE SAMPLING STUDIES WITH CLINICAL SAMPLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- PART I INTRODUCTION: THE EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
- PART II THE EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHOD: PROCEDURES AND ANALYSES
- PART III EXPERIENCE SAMPLING STUDIES WITH CLINICAL SAMPLES
- 7 Variability of schizophrenia symptoms
- 8 The daily life of ambulatory chronic mental patients
- 9 ‘Goofed-up’ images: thought sampling with a schizophrenic woman
- 10 The social ecology of anxiety: theoretical and quantitative perspectives
- 11 Consequences of depression for the experience of anxiety in daily life
- 12 Dysphoric moods in depressed and non-depressed adolescents
- 13 Capturing alternate personalities: the use of Experience Sampling in multiple personality disorder
- 14 Bulimia in daily life: a context-bound syndrome
- 15 Alcohol and marijuana use in adolescents' daily lives
- 16 Drug craving and drug use in the daily life of heroin addicts
- 17 Stress, coping and cortisol dynamics in daily life
- 18 Vital exhaustion or depression: a study of daily mood in exhausted male subjects at risk for myocardial infarction
- 19 Blood pressure and behavior: mood, activity and blood pressure in daily life
- PART IV THERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHOD
- PART V PSYCHIATRIC RESEARCH APPLICATIONS: PRACTICAL ISSUES and ATTENTION POINTS
- CLOSING Looking to the future
- References
- List of contributors
- Index
Summary
There are, in the psychiatric and popular literature, both true and fictional accounts of the experience of being schizophrenic (e.g., Beers, 1908; Green, 1970; Sechehaye, 1951). Such narrative descriptions are powerful human documents, and have profoundly influenced the practice of psychiatry (Kaplan, 1964, p. 146).
With few exceptions (e.g., Custance, 1952), such descriptions are written retrospectively, during remission or years after the episodes described, and are thus vulnerable to the distortion of selective memory, forgetting, condensation of events, details within events, etc. The time-sampling methods described in this book were explicitly developed to minimize the distortions due to retrospective reporting. While those time-sampling studies are quantitative analyses, a variant of the ‘beeper’ method can be used to create narrative descriptions that are not retrospective (or only slightly so), and thus also minimize distortion.
This method generates narrative descriptions of the moment-by-moment inner experiences of subjects, descriptions that are impossible to generate by any other method. The authors are preparing a collection of such experience descriptions of normal and disturbed subjects to exemplify the range of human experience. We provide here an excerpt from the description of a young schizophrenic woman to demonstrate how this descriptive time-sampling method can augment the understanding of schizophrenia provided both by retrospective narrative descriptions and by quantitative time-sampling methods.
This example may prove useful if readers pause before reading further to ask themselves what is generally understood by psychiatric professionals about how schizophrenics experience their inner world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Experience of PsychopathologyInvestigating Mental Disorders in their Natural Settings, pp. 123 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992