LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS IN SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENT COMMUNICATION IN GUIDED INTERVIEWS – A FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTIC CASE STUDY

Abstract

The case study presents the preliminary results of an interdisciplinary research related to doctor-patient communication. Discourse analysis is particularly relevant in the context of psychotherapeutic consultations, where the success of the communication and the therapy largely depend on the patient’s capacity to adequately interpret the interlocutor’s inner mental states, referred to as mentalisation. Numerous studies have outlined that individuals with schizophrenia have mentalising deficiencies, which may be reflected in their language use. The case study involves guided interviews related to Hemingway’s short story entitled The End of Something conducted by a PhD student of psychology and a patient with schizophrenia and a control participant, separately. The dialogues are analysed from a functional linguistic approach with a special focus on deictic elements in order to describe and categorize the language use of patients with schizophrenia. The findings revealed mild forms of deficiencies at the microlinguistic level, as opposed to more significant impairments on the macrolinguistic level including deictic expressions and Grice’s conversational maxims. Hopefully, these findings may contribute to a somewhat deeper understanding of the language use of patients with mental disorders from a pragmatic aspect as well as to the success of psychotherapeutic sessions by offering further methods.