Thank you for your interest in Rethink 'Negative Symptoms'. "Negative symptoms" are a term defined by conventional clinicians and psychiatrists as "an absence or lack of normal mental function involving thinking, behavior, and perception." In conventional clinical textbooks, specific negative symptoms include "amotivation;" "apathy"; "anhedonia," "affective flattening" or "difficulty experiencing normal emotions"; "alogia" or "poverty of speech"; and "social withdrawal." While lived experience advocates and activists have taken up and redefined many other aspects of psychosis, there are very few first person accounts of these (so-called) "negative symptoms" nor collected writings on how these terms impact those who are labelled with them, or whether they even map onto actual subjective experiences.
The goal of this project is to collect direct first person narratives of experiences that have been labelled "negative symptoms" and lived experience perspectives on associated language, terminology and alternatives.
Like our earlier project 'Outside the Box: First Person Accounts of Visions, Quasi-Visions, Felt Presences & Alterations of Time and Space' (
https://rethinkpsychosis.weebly.com/outside-the-box.html), survey submissions collected here are anonymous and will be compiled and re-printed verbatim in a free public booklet. This is *not* a research project and responses will not be analyzed, interpreted or edited.
Nev Jones PhD, Marie Hansen PhD and Shannon Pagdon BA are co-leading this effort. If you have questions about the project please email Nev Jones at nevjones@pitt.edu. Thank you!