ABSTRACT
Healthcare interactions are increasingly restrained by limitations in time, capacity, and resources, making communication between parties challenging. Much of the literature for healthcare professionals on consultation skills, clinical reasoning, and developing therapeutic healthcare relationships assumes typical communication from both the healthcare professional and the patient. The comparison between typical and atypical communicators, two categorically different groups has been an endemic, classic approach in the field of communication development. Much of our knowledge on atypical communication has been built on variants of this dichotomised approach. By comparing discrete groups, it tends to narrow one’s focus on differences rather than similarities between groups. This comparative approach is generally founded on the assumption that typically developing individuals are the benchmark for normative functioning and the measuring stick for optimal development. This creates the potential to overlook the ways in which atypical individuals may be advantaged in communication development and the processing of information. By exploring the characteristics that fall along the spectrum from typical to atypical communication it can help highlight the fundamental similarities in communication development and may also aid in the social de-stigmatisation of individuals with particular conditions.
In this chapter, the authors introduce the focus of the book by illuminating for the reader a body of literature that explores how to take a dimensional approach in considering the full spectrum of variation, ranging from typical to atypical communication development in a culturally and socially diverse healthcare context; with the understanding that insight gained from both typical and atypical communication is mutually informative. The impact of comparative approaches to how atypical communication is understood in healthcare and the challenges it presents in everyday healthcare interactions is also considered.
