Called the “god of dance,” Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the most widely renowned dancers of the 20th century. He gained fame as a male ballet dancer and choreographer in the celebrated Parisian dance company, Ballets Russes. Unfortunately, his brilliant career was cut short by a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was institutionalized in 1919 and spent the last three decades of his life in and out of asylums. During a six-week period when he was gripped by psychosis, he kept a diary, which is now the subject of a new study into how mental illness can affect language.
“Language provides a window into someone’s mind,” explained study author Alban Voppel, professor of AI and psychiatry at McGill University in a statement. “Complete book-length texts written during an active psychotic episode are quite rare, giving us a unique opportunity to study language as the illness was unfolding.”
Read more: “Fire in the Brain: How Psychosis May Arise When the Body Attacks Itself”
Voppel and a team of researchers conducted a computational linguistic autopsy of Nijinsky’s diary using tools that measured patterns in word use as well as sentence structure. They wanted to find out if the linguistic pathologies of formal thought disorders (like schizophrenia) manifest in how topics are connected or in the words used to convey them.
To find out, they compared Nijinsky’s writing to a control text from his wife Romola: the forward she wrote when she published a heavily edited version of his diary in 1936. They chose her writing because the two texts were of similar length, from roughly the same period, and written about similar subjects. Most importantly, Romola had no history of psychiatric illness.
The team found Nijinsky often wrote in circles using the same words repetitively. This had the effect of demonstrating a kind of superficial coherence, when the work as a whole was generally incoherent. “It’s sort of a fake coherence, a mechanical coherence,” Voppel said. “He came back to the same topics and used a lot of the same words, especially ‘I,’ ‘God’ and ‘love.’”
These words represented a kind of structural scaffold for the rest of Nijinsky’s meandering thoughts—the lettuce in his word salad.
According to the team, this suggests that psychosis can affect language at different levels. It’s possible that a person succumbing to acute mental illness can still communicate in a broad narrative structure while their vocabularies become increasingly limited by their disorder. “Nijinsky’s diary is not simply a document of suffering or a record of thought disorder,” the researchers wrote, “it is an unwitting self-portrait of a mind condensing around a fixed, narrow repertoire of words and the concepts they stand for.”
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