Narrating the experience of chronic psychiatric difficulties: Four life stories

The focus of this dissertation was to explore the experience of psychiatric distress as a life narrative, conceptualized by the flow of the life story with the preconditions that contributed to the psychiatric distress, including how the psychiatric crisis came to be and how the individual incorporated the psychiatric difficulty into his or her life narrative. The aim of this research was to depart from medical and disease models of understanding psychiatric conditions by locating the individuals' subjectivity within their life narratives. I documented how psychiatric suffering typically viewed as disease entities can be understood as life events that are produced by life contexts, which may include stressors such as poverty, trauma, and difficulties with attachments. An interpretive phenomenological analysis approach was used to explain the experiences of participants through their own perspectives and the contexts in which participants experienced the phenomena. Descriptions of four clinical cases illustrate the life stories of individuals who faced psychiatric suffering. Themes of trauma, early attachment difficulties, unprocessed emotions, depression, dissociation, psychosis, and stigma were explored as contexts for life events.