Nonverbal codes of Schizophrenic patients: A study on communication of Schizophrenic patients

ABSTRACT

Schizophrenia is a form of the mental illness that involves disorders of thought process, flattened affect, withdrawal from social situation and bizzare behavior. It strikes people in the young age. In the speech communication, people who suffered from schizophrenia say strange things and say things in strange ways. Their speech sometimes jumps from one topic to another topic.

This study focuses on speech of schizophrenic patient. Their speeches are analyzed by discourse approaches such as coherence and cohesive. In speech activity the non-verbal codes and verbal codes have equal role. Thus, this study also focuses in Non-verbal behaviour of schizophrenic. For the non-verbal classification, it follows the system used by Mark Knapp to understand the phenomena being dealt with. These are artifacs, proxemics, and paralanguage.

For gathering the data, the researcher utilized participant observation. In analyzing the data . Triangulation was employed for gathering data and confirming the research finding. The finding will confirm with the theory, another research and the psychiatrist.

The result of this study identifies two symptoms of schizophrenic speech. Firstly, lack of coherence. Although there are some links between adjacent utterances, the overall answer is an incoherent response to the question. Many of speech of schizophrenics are seemed related to one another, but the text as a whole is somewhat disjointed. Secondly, less lexical cohesive. The patients link their present speech to previous speech considerably less. They were most often in the form of simple lexical ties, which often involve repeating words used previously. The speech communication of schizophrenic patients is haphazard, and disorganized. It is because the differences between actual and received stimuli in the process of communication.

From the data obtained, it indicates that nonverbal codes are the medium for communicating emotion. Over the distance (proxemics) reports friendly, closeness. Their facial expressions including eye behaviours reported happiness, sadness, suspicious, embarrassed, fear, disappointing. Paralanguage -voice, intonation- revealed meaning that the patients are anger, hesitation, sorrow, impatience, sometimes hate, fear, admiration, respect, disgusting, and happiness.

From the data obtained, the nonverbal codes when joining with verbal codes serve various functions. Non-verbal codes can substitute for, complement, emphasize, repeated, contradict and regulate.