La metáfora conceptual en el discurso psiquiátrico sobre la esquizofrenia

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the conceptual metaphors used by psychiatrists in their discourse about schizophrenia in a dissemination context, thus leading to infer their underlying models of conceptualization of such disorder. The corpus has been set up from a documentary film in Spanish showing first person interviews to health professionals, patients and relatives. Among them all, psychiatrists’ interventions have been selected and their metaphorical expressions have been detected, extracted, quantified and classified. In a second phase, corresponding conceptual metaphors have been inferred and classified according to target domains. The findings show the major conceptualization patterns of schizophrenia revealed by those metaphors used by the psychiatrists of the corpus and their relation to either biomedical or social models of illness. The main patterns detected are the following: illness as an external agent showing volitional behavior; illness as an explicit enemy in metaphors of war, where the patient is kept in a situation of inferiority; objectification of the patient; and, in general, presence of conceptual metaphors opposite to patients’ empowerment. As a main conclusion, the psychiatrists of the corpus result to be mainly positioned in the biomedical model of conceptualization of schizophrenia