I was wondering, if an individual who is diagnosed with Schizophrenia would have hallucinations and delusions, which co-relate with their personality. For instance, an individual who is high on anxiety would have paranoid delusions etc.
I agree with Stephen regarding a role for hypervigilance, and would add habitual suppression and environmental stressors to that mix. I would expect that personality variables would also play a role in content, especially in terms of what kinds of things people find relevant, the way they attend to them, and how they interpret and cope with them. But I'd also expect many paths to things like paranoid content vs grandiose etc as Stephen's example illustrates nicely. I haven't read a lot on this - there's not a great deal of research on what affects the content of hallucinations (most of it looks at links to past experiences I believe) and even less investigating personality traits. I have read one study that found associations between being prone to hallucinations and Openness to Experience among both young and elderly people, and Neuroticism for the young group only. It doesn't look at content, only type of hallucinatory experience, including vivid daydreams. Also a spanish study found people associations between having imagery and schizoid, histrionic and negativistic/self-defeating dimensions. Again it doesn't really go into hallucinatory content though.
www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/science/article/pii/S0191886905000115
http://www.psychologyinspain.com/content/full/1997/2frame.htm
Absolutely yes. In recent years there has been an alarming tendency to ignore the psychological aspects of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Of course it is true that these disorders are, for the most part, subtle brain diseases. But the specific psychotic experiences of any individual patient are far from being random neural events. We can go far toward understanding the conflicts and defenses and so forth of a patient by attending carefully to their symptoms.
The old psychoanalysts were mostly wrong about the causes of schizophrenia. But they were very fine clinical observers.
I question the idea that schizophrenia spectrum disorders are brain diseases, but I'm with you on the rest.
Indeed in recent years there has been an alarming tendency to see psychotic disorders as just biological disorders, while, attending carefully to theirs psychotic symptoms we can know more deeply their psychological pain, but I do not think that we can establish a simple linear relation between their personality, or even their psychological appearance ante psychosis to the nature of their delusional beliefs. In my clinical practice it s not so common to observe a correspondence like : narcisistic traits and a grandeur delusion or, as you say, premorbid anxiety and persecutory beliefs. Sure, there is a relation between the psychotic sympoms and psychological contents, but it s not a linear one. That is because psychotic thought dont transform a psychological experience in a mental coscient phenomena in a linear way, but the trasformation is a non linear one. In this way it can happen that a love conflict can transform himself in a persecutory belief or a dependence problem show himself like a grandeur delusion.
Ref. Bion W. Trasformations. Change from learning to growth. 1965.
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