Discourse as a Tool for the Diagnosis of Psychosis: a Linguistic and Psychiatric Study of Communication Decline

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can play a valuable role in the diagnosis of psychosis. Psychosis, after all, emerges in an economic, social and political context that influences psychotic patients’ relative decline and health care opportunities. Such opportunities for patients in this study ranged from total absence, in the case of homeless people, through to various levels of state and institutional involvement — patients lodged in shelters, inpatients at private clinics, and outpatients at state hospitals. The chapter, therefore, also reflects upon the role of psychiatric institutions (or their absence) in the diagnosis and care of delusional patients.

I am grateful for Virginia Buscaglia’s advice on the psychiatric aspects of this chapter, for Dr Beatriz Dorfman Lerner’s comments, contribution to the corpus and continual guidance, and for Mónica Descalzi’s translation of this chapter into English.