Identity in Clinical Psychology (Review of Concepts and Research Methods)

Background: the domestic approach to working with mental disorder postulates the impossibility of treating the disease without taking into account the personality and its environment. While the concept of identity has been widely studied in sociology and social psychology, there is little empirical research on this topic in clinical psychology. The aim was to provide an overview of various theoretical concepts of identity, to present the results of empirical research, to analyse the tools used to assess identity in different approaches, to show the limitations of frequently used tools that create difficulties in their application in the clinic. Materials and Methods: using the keywords “identity”, “diffuse identity”, “identity diagnostics”, “depression”, “schizophrenia”, “mental disorders”, articles in English and Russian in MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and e-library databases were searched. Conclusion: analysis of published works shows that most of the available studies study either the development of identity in adolescence, or one of the aspects of identity, namely the feeling of belonging to a group on one or more grounds (ethnic identity, gender identity, professional identity). At the same time, an analysis of approaches and studies of identity within the framework of a psychiatric clinic shows that the approach closest to the tasks of clinical psychology and psychiatry is an approach that considers identity from the point of view of personality structure, its characteristics and pathology. The use of the identity construct in clinical psychology seems useful, since it allows for the formalization of the normative and different conditions in pathology when assessing and classifying mental disorders. It suggests available methods for evaluating various aspects of identity in the clinic of mental disorder. This makes it possible, when describing mental health disorders, to take into account the factors that cause the lack or violation of certain states and features of mental functioning that are not the explicit causes of the observed dysfunctions.

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