This paper explores the potential role of metaphor as a signal and determinant of distress in first-person accounts of voice-hearing by people with schizophrenia diagnoses. The degree of distress experienced by voicehearers depends, amongst other factors, on voice-hearers' perceptions of the "power" of the voices, and on the extent to which the voices can control or be controlled by the person. Metaphors are well known to both reflect and reinforce particular ways of making sense of subjective

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... nd sensitive experiences, including in terms of attributions of agency, power and control. Metaphors were systematically identified and analysed in semi-structured interviews with 10 voice-hearers with diagnoses of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Divergent uses of metaphors framed the experience of voicehearing in distinctive ways and were found to have different implications for perceptions of mutual power and control between voice-hearer and voices. Participants who used metaphors in which they are in disempowered positions tended to report higher level of distress, while participants who used metaphors in ways that constructed them as empowered tended to report lower levels of distress. It is argued that metaphor analysis can be usefully added to well-established approaches to both understanding and addressing distress in voice-hearers. ARTICLE HISTORY are generally language-based (e.g. clinical interviews, such as the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales, Haddock, McCarron, Tarrier, & Faragher, 1999) linguistic analysis is not typically used to explore individuals' descriptions of their experiences. With this paper, we illustrate how linguistics, specifically metaphor theory, provides useful analytical and conceptual insights into distressing voices, and we suggest how these insights may have significant implications for clinical practice. We draw out two aspects of voice-hearing described metaphorically by our participants: their relationships with voices and the phenomenology of the experience itself. In linguistics, including particularly discourse analysis and metaphor theory, there are systematic and theoretically based ways of investigating people's linguistic choices, i.e. how people say what they say. These involve looking at what linguistic choices are made (consciously or not) in contrast with choices that could have been made, how such choices pattern systematically, and what the implications are for people's views, experiences, challenges and needs. In this paper, we focus specifically on metaphors because metaphors are well known to both reflect and reinforce particular ways of making sense of subjective and sensitive experiences (e.g. Semino, Demjén, Hardie, Payne, & Rayson, 2018b). We demonstrate the use of linguistic metaphor analysis as a tool for making more of the lived experience accounts of voice-hearing in a clinical sample. We are specifically concerned with how different metaphors frame the experience of voice-hearing in terms of agency and (dis)empowerment. These aspects of metaphorical framings are closely linked with perceptions of control and power, which, as mentioned above, are known to correlate with the degree of distress experienced by voice-hearers. We therefore propose that metaphor analysis can contribute to both understanding and addressing distress in voice-hearers.