Metaphor framing and distress in lived-experience accounts of voice-hearing

Abstract

This paper explores the potential role of metaphor as a signal and determinant of distress in first-person accounts of voice-hearing by people with schizophrenia diagnoses. The degree of distress experienced by voicehearers depends, amongst other factors, on voice-hearers' perceptions of the "power" of the voices, and on the extent to which the voices can control or be controlled by the person. Metaphors are well known to both reflect and reinforce particular ways of making sense of subjective and sensitive experiences, including in terms of attributions of agency, power and control. Metaphors were systematically identified and analysed in semi-structured interviews with 10 voice-hearers with diagnoses of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Divergent uses of metaphors framed the experience of voicehearing in distinctive ways and were found to have different implications for perceptions of mutual power and control between voice-hearer and voices. Participants who used metaphors in which they are in disempowered positions tended to report higher level of distress, while participants who used metaphors in ways that constructed them as empowered tended to report lower levels of distress. It is argued that metaphor analysis can be usefully added to well-established approaches to both understanding and addressing distress in voice-hearers.

Metaphors of Depression. Studying First Person Accounts of Life with Depression Published in Blogs

“…With regard to conceptual metaphor detection in discourses about severe mental illnesses, apart from the works about depression that we are going to present in more detail below, in the field of cognitive linguistics studies have been carried out on obsessive-compulsive disorder (Knapton, 2016a(Knapton, , 2016bKnapton & Rundblad, 2018) and on schizophrenia, in particular the analysis of metaphors of schizophrenia produced by patients and mental health professionals in documentary films about this mental disorder (Climent & Coll-Florit, 2017;Coll-Florit, Miranda, & Climent, 2019) and the study of metaphors in accounts of voice-hearing (Demjén, Marszalek, Semino, & Varese, 2019).…”

A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices

“…Linguistics has been used recently to examine differing use of first- and second-person constructions in people with schizophrenia (Tovar et al, 2019 ), and to compare differences in the linguistic structure of voice “utterances” in clinical and non-clinical voice-hearing (De Boer et al, 2016 ). However, this work has largely focused on syntactic and grammatical differences that may reflect underlying deficit or disorder, rather than using linguistics to illustrate and elucidate experiential qualities of voice-hearing (but see Demjén et al, 2019 ; Demjén et al, 2020 ).…”

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“…Distress is characteristic of some specific situations, groups, or age of people. The literature on distress shows that the concept is either tied to a certain age, e.g., infants, children (Brafman, 2016) or to special groups of people, e.g., racial or ethnic minority students (Nidich, 2011), or to a mental disease (Crowe & Alavi, 1999;Demjén, Marszalek, Semino, & Varese, 2019), physical illness, e.g., respiratory distress. Hence, it proves to be triggered by specific factors, known as stressors, which are always context-bound.…”

“…The notion of power introduced in discourse analysis of media by Dijk (2006), is of pivotal importance to the intensity scale of experiencing distress. Participants, who feel no power over the stressor, reported higher levels of distress than those in the empowered position (Demjén, Marszalek, Semino, & Varese, 2019). Tiemeyer (2013) asserts that laments and penitential prayers are the means of distress implementation.…”

“…Tiemeyer (2013) asserts that laments and penitential prayers are the means of distress implementation. Previous studies of conceptual metaphors of distress (King, 2012;Demjén, Marszalek, Semino, & Varese, 2019;Verbytska, 2017) touch upon the cross-cultural investigation of distress in Hebrew, corpus-based approaches of distress metaphors in clinical and media discourses. Investigating distress in film, Lotsu (2020) asserts that empathic distress is necessary to instigate a process of social reformation by transforming film viewers' perceptions and attitudes, and Krysanova (2019) considers it to be an emergent dynamic discursive construct.…”