Schizophrenia: the quest for a minimum sense of identity to ward off delusional disorder

This study was designed to analyze the language of patients with schizophrenia exhibiting negative symptoms during a 3-month period.

The computer-assisted ALCESTE method was used to simultaneously analyze the subjects' oral behaviour and speech patterns at various levels.

The tested subjects had very specific speech patterns. Most significantly, analysis of the underlying syntactic processes showed that the patients exhibited a sense of identity, however minimum, based on their own pathologies and on the surrounding world. In our previous study, no such characteristics were observed in the discourse of schizophrenia patients with delusions (exhibiting positive symptoms). This suggests that the minimum sense of identity that develops in patients with schizophrenia allows them to avoid positive symptoms.

In studies of language production by subjects suffering from schizophrenia, it is necessary to distinguish between patients with positive symptoms and those with negative symptoms. The speech patterns of these 2 groups have to be analyzed separately, which has not been done previously, since the groups differ in too many respects.