Self and narrative in schizophrenia: time to author a new story

There are a couple of reasons why the topic for this chapter may strike some readers as curious. Given the focus of this book, it will not be the interest in narrative or self which will be unexpected, of course, but the notion that these concepts could have relevance within the context of a disease as disruptive and devastating as schizophrenia. While other people can write narratives about persons who have schizophrenia – like Nassar’s1 recent biography of Nobel laureate John Nash – the idea that a person with schizophrenia would construct his own narrative may seem at first counterintuitive. Since it was first identified as the most severe of the mental illnesses over a century ago, schizophrenia has been described not only as a loss of sanity but also as a loss of one’s sense of self at the most fundamental level of self-awareness.2,3 The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, for example, suggests that ‘the sense of self that gives the normal person a feeling of individuality, uniqueness, and self direction is frequently disturbed in schizophrenia’.4