This study was performed in an effort to begin characterization of personality traits in schizophrenia. Specific concerns included personality profiles relative to normal adults, personality profile stability over time, and trait-state issues. The authors administered the NEO Personality Inventory as well as symptom ratings at two time points to 21 patients. Patients were all stabilized outpatients attending an adult continuing day treatment program and diagnosed with either schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Personality profiles were determined for all patients. Compared with a normal adult sample, this sample's scores on three out of five of the personality domains assessed were not distinguishable from normal adults. Test-retest correlations were highly significant over an average 28.2-week time interval. In general, the presence of positive symptoms did not appear related to NEO-PI stability, while negative symptoms did show a relationship to the stability of personality profiles. These data suggest that personality profiles can be looked at in schizophrenia, that these profiles do appear stable over time, and that negative symptoms have a strong influence on profile stability and appear to be "trait-like."

Theoretical formulations of the past thirty years have championed the hypothesis that family interaction contributes heavily to the etiology of schizophrenia, a position that has dominated contemporary family therapy even in the absence of solid empirical confirmation. The possibility that sociogenic modeling of schizophrenia is not only incorrect but even harmful to families, and to the relationship between families and clinicians, has never been taken seriously, despite its implications for the practice of family therapy. The author describes untoward effects of the sociogenic hypothesis in his own ten-year experience with families of chronic schizophrenics and examines pertinent reports in the family therapy literature, offering the reinterpretation that many communicational aberrations are adaptations to two therapist attributes: (a) failure to absolve the family of initial causal responsibility, and (b) failure to inform the family about the nature of the illness.