Disturbances of time experience in mental disorders

Abstract

Experience of time is afield of only little research in psychiatry which is and was often induced by philosophers interested in the human existence in time. This review article underlines the importance to differentiate between several forms of time experience. With respect to current knowledge, there are disturbances of time experience in the sense of knowledge about basal temporal relations only in organic brain disorders, while objective time perception was found to be changed in patients with schizophrenia, but less in those with depression. In contrast, the subjective time feeling seems to be disturbed in several psychiatric diseases. Up to now, however, it is still unclear how especially the subjective time feeling as a psychopathological alteration could be best scientifically investigated, without focusing only on the phenomenological single case level. Therefore, time experience should be studied at different levels of time perception and time feeling in mental disorders combined also with modern neurobiological methods, such as EEG and fMRI, in order to clarify in which specific way changed time experience is present in mentally ill patients and how this could be relevant for the pathophysiology of these illnesses.