Correlation of avoidance rates and overall social anxiety in patients with paranoid schizophrenia

Banik Erika Igorevna

The relevance of the work is due to the growing number of cases of schizophrenia and similar disorders, as well as the low level of disclosure in the domestic scientific literature of issues related to the study of social anxiety in people with paranoid schizophrenia. Early studies by the author of this article found that the average total score of the Libowitz social anxiety scale, fear subscales and avoidance subscales in patients with paranoid schizophrenia is higher than in patients with a non-paranoid form of schizophrenia. The aim of this study is to investigate the correlation of avoidance rates and the overall level of social anxiety in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. The main research method: a survey of respondents according to the methods of the Libowitz Social Anxiety Scale and the Social Anxiety and Sociophobia Questionnaire (OSTiSF), followed by statistical processing of the obtained numerical data, is the calculation of Spearman correlation coefficients. The data processing allowed us to conclude that patients with paranoid schizophrenia (experimental group) have a significant correlation between the total Libowitz score, the Libowitz scale avoidance subscore and the contact avoidance subscore in expert situations (OSTiSF method). A promising direction of continued work is the repetition of experience on a larger sample with a comparison of results.

Keywords:paranoid schizophrenia; social anxiety; Libowitz scale; OSTiSF; avoidance; anxiety disorder.