In Chile, since 2000, severe psychiatric disorders have been one of the seven programmatic priorities of public mental health policies. This priority was emphasized in 2005, including the treatment of First Episode Schizophrenia in the Regime of Explicit Health Guarantees. This mental health problem, highly relevant in epidemiological and clinical terms, usually occurs during adolescence: a period of active processes of identity construction and subjective history and, added to this, the experience of a first psychotic episode and subsequent recovery. First episode schizophrenia, widely researched in the field of clinical psychology and social sciences, has been insufficiently addressed from the perspective of subjective experiences of patients in treatment. The aim of the study was to analyze the subjective experiences associated with the diagnosis and treatment of first episode schizophrenia, in order to interpret the way these experiences participated in the construction of an autobiographical narrative. This was an interpretive qualitative single case study of a 17-year-old male participant, discharged from a day hospital for adolescents in the Metropolitan region. He was interviewed indepth and the resulting corpus was studied based on discourse analysis, incorporating the input from the hermeneutics of Ricoeur. The results suggest that the adolescent who experienced his first psychotic episode faces complex subjective experiences about diagnosis and treatment, which are discursively elaborated within the context of autobiographical reconstruction processes.
Abarzúa, M. (2013). “I must have schizophrenia maybe”: Subjective experience and autobiographical construction in an adolescent with first episode schizophrenia. Revista De Psicología, 22(2), Pág. 75–86. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-0581.2013.30855
Twitter