With the interdisciplinary approach of three research units (UniCa, UniMe, and UniCh) combining philosophy of language and mind, experimental pragmatics, cognitive science, psychiatry and neuroscience, the project investigates epistemic injustice in metaphorical communication in the case of mental illness. Focusing on schizophrenia, the project analyzes the cognitive and bodily mechanisms at the roots of the failure to attribute credibility (testimonial injustice) and interpretive capacities (hermeneutical injustice) to people with mental illness, when they communicate their illness to other people via metaphors vs. their literal counterparts. We hypothesize that both patients’ difficulties in embodying metaphors in communicating their mental illness and interpreters’ negative social and moral stereotypes concur to create the case for epistemic injustice, in its double shape of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The project will go at the roots of the reasons for this failure in mental illness communication via metaphors, exploring 1) the interpreter’s perspective (UniCa), 2) the mental-ill speaker’s perspective (UniMe), and 3) the mental-ill speaker/interpreter interaction (UniCh), to understand the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the missing attunement between people with mental illness and interpreters.

Metaphor is proposed as a valuable resource to foster a better attunement between the speaker with schizophrenia and the interpreter and to possibly prevent or overcome epistemic injustice in illness communication. Metaphor is indeed a necessary tool for people with schizophrenia to express their illness and themselves in relationship with the illness, but also for the relevant others (families, friends, doctors, healthcare professionals, people in their social life, etc.) to have access to what the speaker feels as meaningful to articulate of their experience of illness. Results will significantly advance the understanding of the linguistic and cognitive aspects of metaphor use in mental illness communication, with interdisciplinary scientific academic impact and social impact on public policies and health institutions. A social campaign, based on the experimental data on metaphors production/understanding and the active engagement of stakeholders, will also be designed and produced, with an impact on the general public. Finally, the outcomes will lead to the development of possible novel rehabilitative interventions and novel social behaviors of caring to prevent epistemic injustice.