Studying the Verschrobene phenomenon in clinical psychology: current issues

Abstract

The history of research into the phenomenon of schizotypy has led to the ambiguity of its significance in the field of clinical science at present time. In Russian psychiatry and clinical psychology schizotypy for many years has been primarily identified within the field of endogenous disorders. However, in the recent years having taken into account the body of research undertaken by the foreign clinicists, the new model of the Verschrobene-type changes is being developed in Russia. This model allows to refine the notion of schizotypy within the framework of accumulated clinical data in Russian clinical science and its reconciliation with the record of the foreign colleagues. Due to the formulation of the theory of the Verschrobene-type changes and the collection of empirical data the question of available methodologies has been raised. It has been shown that the perspective of studying the domain of schizotypy-like phenomena is methodologically limited. The only available measure of schizotypal traits in Russian language is the SPQ-74. The article presents the results of the exploratory study of the Verschrobene-type changes, carried out with the use of SPQ-74 on the clinical sample of 51 patients. This study allowed to confirm the hypothesis that postulates the Verschrobene phenomena as separate. However, the efficiency of the use of SPQ-74 in measuring and diagnosing schizotypal traits has not been demonstrated. This poses a question of the potential of using the measures of different type (clinical assessment) where a specialist plays a more significant role, which may counter-balance the vulnerabilities recognized in questionnaires.