Chronic persecutory delusion and autobiographical memories in patients with schizophrenia: a diary study.

Background: While chronic persecutory delusions are typically anchored into patients' everyday life situations, no investigation has ever looked at how situations associated with a feeling of persecution are recorded and later retrieved.

Method: a diary methodology combined with a recognition task involving ten patients with schizophrenia who presented chronic persecutory delusions and ten control participants. Diaries of everyday persecutory events (Pe) and non-persecutory events (nPe) were kept.

Impaired ability to give a meaning to personally significant events in patients with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness affecting sense of identity. Autobiographical memory deficits observed in schizophrenia could contribute to this altered sense of identity. The ability to give a meaning to personally significant events (meaning making) is also critical for identity construction and self-coherence.

Self-defining memories related to illness and their integration into the self in patients with schizophrenia.

Although schizophrenia alters the sense of personal identity, little is known about the impact of illness-related autobiographical events on patients' self-representation. We investigated self-defining memories (SDM) in 24 patients with schizophrenia and 24 controls to explore how illness-related SDM were integrated into the self at both the cognitive (how participants are able to give a meaning to past events: meaning making) and affective levels (how participants can re-experience past negative events as less negative: redemption and benefaction effects). We found that 26% of freely recalled SDM referred to their illness in patients.