Mental state understanding in adult psychiatric disorders: impact on symptoms, social functioning and treatment

Many adults with serious mental illness experience difficulties thinking about their own mental states and the mental states of others. Increasing amounts of evidence have suggested that these difficulties underpin many of the struggles these persons subsequently experience trying to cope with symptoms and distress, to solve social problems and to negotiate with others in order to accomplish important life goals. In this special issue, the contributing authors explore the problems associated with impaired mental state understanding in different psychiatric conditions using a wide range of tools, from laboratory tasks, to self-reports, to discourse analysis. Also, both population-based studies and single-case analyses are adopted. The intent is to shed light how various difficulties in understanding mental states can be detected using different approaches and how findings can be meaningfully integrated within an internally consistent theoretical framework.