Language Therapy for Schizophrenic Patients with Persistent ‘Voices’

Abstract

One of us has hypothesised that the ‘voices' of schizophrenic patients reflect altered preconscious planning of discourse that can produce involuntary ‘inner speech’ as well as incoherent overt speech. Some schizophrenic patients reporting voices do not, however, have disorganised speech. We hypothesise that these ‘counterexample’ patients compensate for impairments of discourse planning by reducing language complexity and relying on highly rehearsed topics. A ‘language therapy’ designed to challenge and enhance novel discourse planning was administered to four such patients; three had significant albeit temporary reductions in the severity of their voices. These clinical findings provide further evidence that alterations of discourse planning may underlie hallucinated voices.