Psychosis, a language game

Found the following interesting excerpt on the internet.

My own experience of paranoia can be succinctly described as using language games. Effectively, my paranoia consisted of the idea that everyone was playing language games and that the object that people were referring to for certain words was me. What I found was that my perception of how people conversed became reduced to the simple rules of a language game, and I was an unwilling participant in this game. The problem was that these games were not harmless communication but used as a way of persecuting me. One reason that I may have had the perception that this was happening was that at some point I began to feel that what people meant could not be accounted for in the usual sense. So I resorted to analyzing people’s conversations in terms of a language game. It is possible that my emotional fear of being singled out is what caused me to no longer understand things in their normal way. In any case, any word that could be taken as referring to me, even by oblique references, was interpreted that way. For example, mentioning “America” could be taken to mean “Am Erica,” ie, a coded reference to someone who thinks he’s a woman. I would then take that to mean that the group accepted that this referred to me, with people using gestures, nods, and smiles to confirm to each other that I was the intended reference.

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Yeah misinterpreting things sucks… it’s embarrassing to mishear entirely… and another thing to know you misinterpret things all the time and never know what you are actually supposed to be hearing.

Yes. I did communication at university. Most of my delusions were based on conversation and it’s problems. Paradynamic and sytompatic parts of language. It became problematic when it was introduced to ideas/frames of reference.

What you are describing isn’t anything new. It is your response to mental illness. Take the pills. If you get upright you may not need them but for most it’s pills for life.

My english is bad for an english major!

Yes it must have been interesting studying communication at university level. I think mental illness has it’s roots in interpretation, if that means anything! I thought I’d become fluent in speaking slang.

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