Communication, Inner Speech, and Mental Health

In recent years, significant progress has been made on the philosophical treatment of interpersonal communication, including the relationship between communication and the first person, the sharing and coordination of thoughts, or communication in the face of variation in the way we conceive and use key terms. This progress holds untapped potential to provide a better understanding of cases of self-communication in which one exhibits a capacity to talk to oneself.

Research on inner speech has revealed a good number of ways in which this form of self-communication or self-talk is not only widespread but also cognitively fundamental. Correspondingly, lacking or disrupted inner speech capacities are often associated with psychological or neurological conditions and neurodivergent realities. This research points to the fact that a capacity to communicate with oneself can be a crucial aspect of our cognitive lives and our mental health.

Finally, going full circle, interpersonal communication is also a fundamental dimension for mental health academics, practitioners, patients, and the general public. Despite the increasing volume of scholarly studies on neurodiversity, there continues to be limited focus on the diverse phenomenological and social aspects of neurodivergent experiences, and the way they are communicated in a clinical and ordinary context.

These separate strands of research have not yet been fully integrated. Doing so is the main goal of the project “Communication, Inner Speech, and Mental Health” (CIM) carried out at the Department of Humanities (Pompeu Fabra University). We aim to apply the latest developments within the philosophical literature on interpersonal communication to self-communication or communication with oneself in order to shed light on the complexities characteristic of this critical phenomenon, but also on communication within neurodivergent groups, as well as between these groups and the neurotypical population, both inside and outside academia.

Our main hypothesis—of Vygotskian inspiration—is that the concepts and frameworks found in newest interpersonal communication research can be fruitfully applied to elucidate the notion and forms of self-communication in ways that are relevant to the study of neurodiverse profiles, with a focus on autism and schizophrenia.