Diagnosing schizotypal disorder: Introduction to the multitude of symptoms and live diagnostic interview.

Peter Handest¹; ¹Mental Health Center North Zealand, Denmark

Schizotypal disorder (StD) is best defined as a non-psychotic form of schizophrenia, and shares with it a multitude of disturbing and disabling non-psychotic symptoms. However, StD diagnostic criteria in the ICD and DSM-systems provide only limited information on such vast and multiform psychopathological array. This presentation will therefore focus on some characteristic anomalies of subjective experience (i.e. self-disorder and basic symptom concept) that characterize StD and which are of central clinical value for early differential diagnosis. These experiential anomalies, besides being partly incorporated in current clinical high risk criteria (e.g. COPER and COGDIS), provide a fundamental understanding of the majority of the StD symptoms and their inter-relation. Hence, they are clearly important for timely identification and treatment. These concepts will be defined and reviewed to facilitate their recognition in daily clinical practice, following live-interview with service-user diagnosed with StD.

Topic Area: Diagnosis and Phenomenology

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