Purpose
to describe the communicative behavior of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia in psychosocial rehabilitation.
Methods
a descriptive and exploratory study with a convenience, cross-sectional sample. 50 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, of both sexes, aged between 19 and 75 years, users of a mental health unit in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brasil participated in the study. Survey was conducted in the medical records for personal data and subtype of schizophrenia. To evaluate the communicative behavior, the instrument Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Communication (Drums MAC) was used, which is consisted of 14 tasks that assess discursive aspects: pragmatic-inferential, lexical-semantic and prosodic language.
Results
most participants were males, with low education, Catholics, with schizophrenia paranoid type. The assessment through Battery MAC showed changes in all tasks evaluated and most participants said they were aware of the difficulty related to communication. The biggest changes occurred in the tasks of lexical evocation with semantic criteria, indirect speech acts, conversational discourse and narrative discourse, and the smallest changes occurred in the prosodic components related to understanding, highlighting that the level of production related to linguistic and emotional aspects of prosody also showed considerable change.
Conclusion
all tasks evaluated presented changes. The most affected aspects were the discourse and pragmatics, which should not only be related to linguistic aspects, but also the characteristics of changes in thought and cognition, the affective blunting and social issues of this disorder.
Communication; Schizophrenia; Mental Health; Psychiatric Nursing; Speech; Language and Hearing Sciences
