Schizophrenia spectrum disorders, autism spectrum disorder, and psychopathy may resemble one another at the behavioural surface. All three may involve social difficulties, flattened or atypical affect, unusual communication, interpersonal friction, and impaired social adaptation. Yet their experiential architectures differ in ways that are clinically decisive for differential diagnosis, risk...
Phenomenological research has long provided a foundation for understanding the schizophrenic condition as a whole, yet its contribution to borderline personality disorder (BPD) remains comparatively scattered across different lines of inquiry. Existing phenomenological studies on BPD typically focus on fragmented lived temporality, dysphoric mood, emotion dysregulation and anomalies of lived...
PsychopathologySeptember 21, 2026Johannes Cornelis Van Huizen, Jan-Pieter Teunisse, Antje Orgassa et al.
Autism healthcare has traditionally focused on individual biological and behavioral factors. In recent decades, there has been growing recognition that the outside world also plays an enabling if not constitutive role in the development of support needs. This broader view complicates healthcare delivery as the traditional person-centered focus 'diffuses' into the environment. An integrative...
PsychopathologySeptember 9, 2026Ya-Jing Tang, Wen-Hao Wang, Chen Zhu et al.
Classic models of schizophrenia posit a complete loss of insight during psychotic episodes. However, clinical observations and recent phenomenological research, especially those on double bookkeeping, suggest that some patients retain partial self-observation capacities. This study explores the consciousness structure of schizophrenia, with particular attention to the partial insight phenomena....
Felt presence (FP) is an emerging field of clinical research and to our knowledge there are no studies exploring the phenomenon within children and young people. The current study aims to address this by reporting the experiences of FPs from a clinical sample of young people involved in the ChUSE trial, a feasibility and acceptability RCT looking at supporting young people with distressing...
Autistic patterns of language use, including echolalia, gestalt language processing, and formulaic repetition, have been theorized largely within behavioral and developmental frameworks. Such accounts have documented the functional range of these phenomena in valuable detail, yet their experiential structure has received little attention. This paper develops a phenomenological account of...
Introduction: Alterations in emotional experiences have been demonstrated in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DPD), typically highlighting a blunting of emotions and decreased ability to recognize and name emotions (i.e., alexithymia). However, less research has focused on how individuals with depersonalization experiences embody emotion states. Therefore, the present study...
Contemporary psychiatry has advanced by decomposing behavior into discrete constructs, improving reliability but fragmenting conceptual foundations. Excessive comorbidity, blurred diagnostic boundaries, and the reification of operational criteria have created a gap between empirical data and the understanding of mental life as a coherent, lived whole - the modern paradox of "more data, less...
INTRODUCTION: Decreased sound tolerance (DST) is a common, yet understudied, sensory experience among individuals with autism. Beyond neurobiological or behavioral explanations, DST can be understood phenomenologically as a distinct mode of auditory being-in-the-world. This study examined how adults with autism experience, interpret, and inhabit their auditory world in situations where sound...
An important feature of contemporary phenomenological psychopathology is the development of explanatory accounts, constructed at the level of first-person experience, for why certain phenomena appear in a psychiatric condition. Termed phenomenological explanation, this approach to explanation is intended to uniquely contribute to diagnostic classification and etiology. Despite its promise for...
There is a growing need to translate insights from phenomenological psychopathology into psychotherapeutic practice. Phenomenology offers a deeper understanding of the lived experience of psychosis, and this understanding can render psychotherapy more individualized, empathically attuned, and recovery-oriented by attending to experiential dimensions that conventional, symptom-focused approaches...
Delusions can be strikingly selective: individuals may hold highly elaborated, unshakeable beliefs in one domain while remaining otherwise cognitively intact. Models emphasising dopaminergic salience or belief-updating failures account for the intensity and persistence of delusions but struggle to explain their circumscribed nature. This paper develops a conceptual framework that complements...
The Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences (IPASE) was developed as an easy-to-use, self-report measure of self-disorders. Self-disorders are subtle, trait-like, non-psychotic anomalous self-experiences that are traditionally assessed by trained raters using a semi-structured clinical interview, such as the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE). Whether self-disorders...
PsychopathologyMarch 27, 2026Xiaoran Ding, Yaping Wu, Juan Yang et al.1 citation
Ketamine has emerged as a promising rapid-acting antidepressant with distinct advantages for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Its therapeutic effects are mediated through multi-target modulation of the glutamatergic system. Unlike conventional antidepressants, ketamine exerts a markedly faster onset of action; however, its long-term safety profile and potential risk of...
This paper proposes a critical expansion of phenomenological psychopathology of the individual to explicitly integrate the collective dimension. In order to accurately describe the scenario of collective life, and its relationship with the psychology and psychopathology of individual existences, we propose two moves: (1) A shift of focus from society (which denotes an organized aggregate of...
The current definition of hallucinations as perception-like experiences has been criticized for neglecting their experiential character and context. This study examined the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) and visual hallucinations (VHs) in schizophrenia and their relation to other psychopathology, particularly basic self-disorders. Twenty patients with...
Felt presence (FP) is the experience that another entity is present in one's proximal environment, despite no sensory evidence. Occurrence of FP is linked to psychosis risk, but qualities of FP in the context of psychosis are not well understood. We conducted an online, exploratory survey assessing qualities of FP in relation to psychosis risk in the general population. Three hundred and...
Healthcare professionals encounter challenges in discerning endogenous and exogenous, drug-related, psychopathological phenomena. This study aimed to explore qualitative differences between hallucinations in schizophrenia and two forms of substance-related psychosis. These are substance-induced psychosis (SIP), which has an acute onset and is usually transient, and substance-related persistent...
Delusions frequently involve strong beliefs about, or interactions with, illusory social agents. Although such agents have been systematically described in hallucinations, few studies have investigated their nature and identity in delusions. We identified 205 electronic mental health records describing the content of delusions from the Clinical Record Interactive Search platform at South London...
Background: Felt presence (FP) - the sensation of someone nearby without sensory evidence - is common in healthy adults and related to psychosis risk. FP may arise from a misattribution of internal signals to an external source and often occurs when people are alone. Interoception, the ability to perceive one's own bodily signals, may help distinguish oneself from others. FP could relate to...
Introduction: In biomedicine, entity experiences are conceptualised as compound hallucinations featuring living beings. The term "experience" suggests that these have an objective basis in reality, as those perceiving them may maintain. So-called jinn encounters, typically described by Muslims with and without a psychiatric diagnosis, involve the multimodal perception of a spirit that, as...
Dynamical systems theory (DST) has recently gained traction as a framework to describe and predict the progression of psychopathology. However, a number of challenges to the application of DST to psychopathology have arisen, including the heterogeneity of symptom measures and the lack of theoretical underpinnings to describe the temporal unfolding of psychiatric illnesses. In this article, we...
The psychopathology of schizophrenia is a complex amalgamation of features that span across different dimensions. These dimensions range from the experience of altered time and space through self-disorders to perceptual, positive, and negative symptoms. The relationship between these different psychopathological dimensions remains unclear. Addressing this gap was the aim of our study. We...
Psychopharmacology is currently plagued by reductionism since it is understood as the treatment of biological and behavioural symptoms of mental disorders without taking into account the subjective life of the self in relation to others. Psychopharmacological interventions, such as antidepressants and antipsychotics, must be situated and discussed within the embodied context of the...
In recent times, adolescents with severe forms of psychopathology that do not unambiguously fit into a precise diagnostic category have come to clinical observation. The diagnoses attributed to these young patients range from borderline personality disorder, to affective disorders, ADHD, and others. These diagnoses are mainly based on behavioural abnormalities (e.g., social withdrawal,...