They have taken out my spinal cord: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of self-boundary in psychotic experience within a sociocentric culture

In the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry, schizophrenia is described as a disturbance of the minimal self, i.e. the most basic form of self-awareness. This disturbance of the minimal self at the individual level is assumed to precede the intersubjective disturbances such as boundary weakening. However, the role of intersubjective disturbances in the emergence and recovery of schizophrenic experience still remains an open question. This phenomenological study focuses on how encounters with others shape self-experience during from psychosis by analyzing this process from the perspective of cultural differences, which in current research is especially under-researched. While most phenomenological accounts are based on first person-accounts from Western, individualist cultures where the self is conceived and experienced as separate to others, the present study qualitatively investigates psychotic experiences of patients from Jaffna, Sri Lanka.