Time experience in patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders.

Background: The experience of time, or the temporal order of external and internal events, is essential for humans. In psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, impairment of time processing has been discussed for a long time.

Aims: In this explorative pilot study, therefore, the subjective time feeling as well as objective time perception were determined in patients with depression and schizophrenia, along with possible neurobiological correlates.

[Disturbances of time experience in mental disorders].

Experience of time is a field of only little research in psychiatry which is and was often induced by philosophers interested in the human existence in time. This review article underlines the importance to differentiate between several forms of time experience. With respect to current knowledge, there are disturbances of time experience in the sense of knowledge about basal temporal relations only in organic brain disorders, while objective time perception was found to be changed in patients with schizophrenia, but less in those with depression.