<p>Social communication deficits are common across mental-health disorders, yet little is known about how individuals perceive their own gesture behaviours. Gaining insight into this, particularly across different disorders, could enhance our understanding of social communicative impairments and disruptions in self-awareness. The current study included 274 participants: N = 113 with schizophrenia, N = 65 with depression and N = 96 healthy controls where we compared self-reported gesture behaviours in social and non-social contexts. These self-reports where further explored in relation to objective-measures of gesture performance and expert-rating scales of symptom severity and social functioning. Both patient groups self-reported impairments compared to controls, but with disorder-specific profiles. Specifically, people with schizophrenia uniquely reported reduced gesture perception and use, while both patient groups reported diminished social gesture production. The schizophrenia group also reported elevated social perception relative to the other groups. The depression group consistently rated themselves higher than the schizophrenia group across domains. Furthermore, only the schizophrenia group showed distinct associations: self-reported social perception was negatively associated with self-reported gesture perception, but positively associated with self-reported social production. Notably, only schizophrenia showed a significant link between self-reported difficulties in social gesture production and objective gesture performance deficits. These findings suggest that disruptions in self-awareness of gesture behaviours manifests differently across disorders and underscore the value of integrating self-report measures together with objective assessments to capture the complexity of social-communicative impairments. This will help in designing tailored interventions aimed at enhancing social communication and awareness in diverse mental-health disorder populations.</p>