Language and Schizophrenia: A Review of Studies in India

Background: Abnormal language is fundamental to schizophrenia sharing a common origin with it. Understanding the language of a person with schizophrenia is very important for the prognosis and intervention. This review focuses on published studies on language and schizophrenia conducted in the Indian subcontinent over the last fifty years. Besides, giving a summary of the research and results of the studies, the review focuses advocating further research with enhanced precision on various levels of research process. Method: Searches were conducted in PubMed and Asian Journal of Psychiatry and some of the articles were handpicked. Any empirical research that focused on the variables language and schizophrenia, and were done on the Indian population were included in the study. The review articles on the same variables were excluded. Studies were further subjected to qualitative evaluation whereas due to heterogeneity in the retrieved studies quantitative evaluation was not performed. Results: After a thorough search, we found very few relevant studies, numbering up to 11 out of 3486 studies. The 11 studies include publications as early as the 1970s. These studies in comparison to numerous studies published in the West emphasize the role of culture in understanding the disease, its relations to other symptoms, and its outcome. These studies focus on constructs like linguistic competence, content and form of language of persons with schizophrenia (PWS) and thought disorder. Discussion: Overall, most of these studies lacked precision. When we compared the national and international studies, we found gaps comprising studies lacking in theoretical and methodological rigour. We present a review of all the available research in this paper and emphasize the necessity of a revival of research in the field.