Depersonalization in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, First-Degree Relatives and Normal Controls

Abstract

Background: Depersonalization occurs in healthy individuals and across a broad range of psychiatric patients. Data on depersonalization in persons linked to patients through genetics, environment or education are scarce. Due to their higher risk of developing psychosis, first-degree healthy relatives might show differences with the general population. This study examines depersonalization in patients with schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorders, their first-degree healthy relatives and normal controls. Methods: The Cambridge Depersonalization Scale was used to measure depersonalization in a sample of 147 clinically stable patients with schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorders, 73 first-degree relatives with no psychiatric history and 172 healthy controls. Mixed effect models were used to account for both the familial structure of the data and the effect of sociodemographic characteristics. Results: Patients obtained higher scores than relatives and controls for frequency and duration of depersonalization experiences, number of items responded positively and total depersonalization, while first-degree relatives obtained lower scores than patients and controls for all these characteristics. Conclusions: First-degree relatives of patients reported fewer episodes of depersonalization, which were less intense and of shorter duration, than healthy controls. This finding might be related to a protection mechanism that keeps first-degree relatives away from near-psychotic experiences. The nature of such a mechanism remains to be discovered.

Personality Traits of Schizophrenic Patients in Remission and Their First-Degree Relatives: A Dopaminergic and Glutamatergic Gene Polymorphism Study

“…2005 higher levels of C. Higher cooperativeness levels may be a protective influence for relatives, as proposed by Smith et al (2). Although research assessing temperament and character in firstdegree relatives has more mixed findings compared to patients (46,47), the relatives of patients exhibited very similar personality profiles to those of patients, which may support the hypothesis of personality as an endophenotype for schizophrenia, as previously suggested by Smith and colleagues (2).…”

Trapped in a Glass Bell Jar: Neural Correlates of Depersonalization and Derealization in Subjects at Clinical High-Risk of Psychosis and Depersonalization–Derealization Disorder

“…Several disorders show symptoms of DP/DR like posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety (1, 7) but also in psychosis (12,14) and in our study, in CHR subjects. In patients clinically suspected to develop psychosis, DR as well as both auto-and somatopsychic DP occurred in roughly 16% of cases, but only DR was found to be psychosis-predictive (46,80).…”

“…Depending on the setting, a review reported DP/DR symptom rates from 7% in outpatients to 36% in inpatients with manifest psychosis ( 1 ). Patients with manifest psychosis had higher DP/DR scores according to the ‘Cambridge Depersonalization Scale’ (CDS) ( 11 ) compared to first-degree relatives and healthy controls ( 12 ). Furthermore, patients with manifest psychosis were assessed for DP with the ‘Bonn Scale for the Assessment of Basic Symptoms’ ( 13 ) and could be differentiated from those without DP with the paradigm of Basic Symptoms ( 14 ).…”

Ego Disturbances in the Sense of Kurt Schneider: Historical and Phenomenological Aspects

“…A particular form of depersonalization which comprises an increasing loss of mineness and not simply alienation has been identified as a central transitional phenomenon and core schizophrenic syndrome. The fact that neurotic experiences of depersonalization represent a qualitatively distinct phenomenon was shown in a comparative investigation of patients with schizophrenia, first-degree relatives and normal controls conducted by Gonzalez-Torres et al [95] using the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale in 2010. The study revealed considerably lower neurotic depersonalization scores for first-degree relatives as compared with the healthy control group.…”