[Personality changes in paranoid schizophrenics in perception of patients and their parents].

AIM: The aim of the paper was to describe and compare personality changes in paranoid schizophrenics in the perception of patients and their parents.

METHOD: 50 paranoid schizophrenics (ICD-10) and their parents were tested using the ACL test. Patients completed the ACL test using instructions "I am" and "Before the illness I was", while for the parents it was: "My child is" and "Before the illness my child was."

RESULTS: Differences between real and retrospective images were treated as the measure of changes. There were 10 differences in the perception of patients, 23 differences in perception of the mothers and 28 differences in perception of the fathers. All these reached statistical significance.

CONCLUSIONS: The sense of self-change in patients is seen as a lower need for exhibition, dominance, aggression, autonomy, self-confidence, in personal adjustment and ideal self scale while higher need for abasement, deference and self-control. Mothers notice more than twice and fathers almost three times more the changes in personality of their children than their children themselves. Lower need for exhibition, dominance, self-confidence, personal adjustment and in ideal self scale and higher need for abasement was observed in the group of patients as well as in the group of mothers and fathers. The level of perception of personality changes in children was similar for both mothers and fathers.