Stylistics: Mind Style in an Autobiographical Account of Schizophrenia

In this chapter, we explore the experience of what can be labelled 'schizophrenia' and 'auditory verbal hallucinations' in the published autobiographical narrative Henry’s Demons (Cockburn and Cockburn 2011a) through the stylistic concept of ‘mind style’. Mind style is the linguistic reflection of a cognitive state through distinctive textual patterns (Fowler 1977; Leech & Short 2007). We focus in particular on patterns of pronoun use, narrative style, visual focus and the presence/absence of the representation of one's own and others' minds. We link these stylistic patterns to theory of mind and speech and thought organisation, both of which play an important role in medical understandings of schizophrenia. In this way, we show how a stylistics approach can add nuance and pose challenges to existing descriptions of and diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.