{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,21]],"date-time":"2026-08-21T17:35:36Z","timestamp":1787333736401,"version":"build-2736575974"},"reference-count":50,"publisher":"BMJ","content-domain":{"domain":["bmj.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med Humanities"],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,28]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    \u2018God of Dance\u2019 Vaslav Nijinsky wrote profusely during a short period in 1918\u20131919, immediately preceding his diagnosis of schizophrenia and long-term confinement. This diary, in its uncensored form, constitutes one of the most extensively documented\n                    <jats:italic>ex tempore<\/jats:italic>\n                    first-person accounts during psychosis. It offers a chance to explore the impact of psychosis on writing\u2014not just on\n                    <jats:italic>what<\/jats:italic>\n                    one writes, but also\n                    <jats:italic>how<\/jats:italic>\n                    one writes under such torment. The text generates a pervasive impression of repetitive, meandering thought\u2014invoking suspicions of being a product of\n                    <jats:italic>formal thought disorder<\/jats:italic>\n                    \u2014an affliction that lies at the core of schizophrenia. We study the specific linguistic structure of this diary using computational approaches, comparing it to a word-count-matched control text composed by his wife, Romola Nijinsky, to characterise what the writing does show. Our computational analysis reveals intact topic-level discourse organisation with adequate surface-level coherence. But this apparent coherence is generated via repetition of words\u2014indexing an inability to escape a narrow lexical repertoire\u2014a pattern we term the\n                    <jats:italic>perseveration paradox<\/jats:italic>\n                    . Furthermore, first-person pronoun usage was 5.45-fold higher than in the control text, and its removal reduced coherence and increased perplexity, demonstrating that the self-pronoun \u2018I\u2019 functioned as a\n                    <jats:italic>structural scaffold<\/jats:italic>\n                    for Nijinsky\u2019s thought in written text. All findings replicated on the original Russian manuscript, confirming robustness despite translation. Nijinsky\u2019s diary is not simply a document of suffering or a record of thought disorder; it is an unwitting self-portrait of a mind condensing around a fixed, narrow repertoire of words and the concepts they stand for.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1136\/medhum-2026-014121","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,21]],"date-time":"2026-08-21T17:20:16Z","timestamp":1787332816000},"page":"medhum-2026-014121","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1136\/crossmarkpolicy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Writing when writhing with psychosis: a computational linguistic autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky\u2019s diary"],"prefix":"10.1136","author":[{"given":"Lena","family":"Palaniyappan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychiatry, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"},{"name":"Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Gleb","family":"Melshin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Oliver","family":"Delgaram-Nejad","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Independent Researcher, Devon, UK"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5405-5803","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Dalia","family":"Elleuch","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Health Sciences, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Alban","family":"Voppel","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychiatry, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"239","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"2026082110201002000_medhum-2026-014121v1.1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"199","DOI":"10.3366\/E0264287509000292","article-title":"Critical Silence: The Unseemly Games of Love in Jeux (1913)","volume":"27","author":"J\u00e4rvinen","year":"2009","journal-title":"Dance Research"},{"key":"2026082110201002000_medhum-2026-014121v1.2","unstructured":"Acocella J . 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