We administered a series of 12 brief vignettes depicting examples of p
ositive, negative, and manic psychopathology in everyday language to 2
1 patients with schizophrenia and 20 patients with mania. We asked pat
ients to rate, first, how similar they were to the individual depicted
in each vignette, and, second, the degree to which the experiences or
behaviors depicted in each vignette reflected mental illness. Psychia
trists also rated how similar each patient was to each vignette. At ad
mission, patients with schizophrenia rated themselves as significantly
less similar to the positive symptom vignettes than the psychiatrists
rated them. Patients with mania did not differ from the psychiatrist
in rating their similarity to the vignettes, but they strongly denied
that the vignettes reflected mental illness.