NCMD Seminar 13th February 2026

Speaker: Dr Tibor Kovacs, Consultant Psychiatrist in Early Intervention in Psychosis, CNTW.

Presentation title:  Metaphor and psychosis – a qualitative evaluation of metaphor use in psychosis and exploring the impact of trauma

I will briefly summarise some theoretical considerations regarding the use of nonliteral speech in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders and I will present the results of an interdisciplinary qualitative study that I carried out together with a small research team. We are all familiar with expressions used by patients when they talk about 'people are reading my mind' or 'the voices are bombarding me', but what do these tell us about people's lived experience? Our study looks at such questions from the cognitive-semantic point of view, adapting methodologies of metaphor analysis to the study of psychopathology. We explore the concept of schema as it is used in the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (image-schema theory) and in psychology/psychiatry (Beck, Turkington, Fowler). We found image schemas of containment, reification, personification, space schematic and force dynamic interactions, which often occur in expressions that indicate psychological attitudes of perceiving the self as vulnerable, weak (and at times valuable), and others as bad, harsh or deceptive.

Our team includes DR Tibor Kovacs, Dr Stuart Watson, Dr Nick Riches, Nina Cioroboiu, Andrew Robson, and Prof Douglas Turkington.