Clinical Application of Rorschach in Diagnosing Paranoid Schizophrenia: Across-Cultural Comparison

There is accumulating evidence that projective techniques can be successfully used in clinical differential diagnosis. Rorschach is one of the mot powerful techniques employed for this purpose. The advantage of a projective technique, especially Rorschach, for clinical diagnosis lies in its nonreactive nature and the response facilitating characteristic for the psychologically and mentally disturbed unresponsive individuals. Even minimum responses of a patient to Rorschach may be interpreted to have some ideas about his mental state. Rorschach can be effectively utilized in our socio-cultural context for a number of reasons (Farooqi, 1987). The incidence of mental illness is presumed to be high in our poor and illiterate population. These persons can not be administered a verbal clinical test, e.g., MMPI for diagnostic purposes. Moreover, in the absence of indigenous criteria and norms for the classification of mentally ill, the majority of the clinicians make use of their own clinical experience in diagnosing the illness of a patient. This may lead, in considerable number of cases, to erroneous judgments. The use of Rorschach, as a diagnostic instrument, would be helpful in arriving at a more objective assessment. Thus, studies are needed to be conducted to develop the norms for different diagnostic categories and to determine Rorschach's diagnostic validity. The present study is an attempt to explain the method and procedure of using Rorschach for diagnostic purpose in the case of paranoid schizophrenia.