Representing Madness: How Are Subjective Experiences of Emotional Distress Presented in First-Person Accounts?

Abstract

Close to 600 first-person narratives of madness have been published in English alone, offering invaluable insight into emotional distress from a rarely studied perspective. The goals of this study were (a) to analyze how writers of such narratives present their subjective experience of emotional distress in terms of narrative structure and voice and (b) to examine how the author's purpose in writing the narrative affects its form. Previous studies of physical illness narratives have shown that they can be categorized into types based on structure and style. We asked: Are emotional distress narratives similar, or do they constitute a unique form? Ten such narratives were analyzed, with respect to the following four dimensions: writer's subjective experience, narrative structure, voice, and purpose. The results suggest a typology of narratives of emotional distress that is quite distinct from those constructed for physical illness.For more than a century, psychologists have struggled to conceptualize human experience, debating psychoanalysis, behaviorism, phenomenology, and cognitive theory, among other frameworks of meaning. A crucial perspective has, however, been conspicuously absent from these debates: first-person accounts of subjective experience. It is as if people's personal constructions of their lived experiences

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Uncovering Recovery: The Resistible Rise of Recovery and Resilience

“…In their review of recovery models Leamy, Bird, Le Boutillier, Williams, & Slade (2011) examined 97 separate contributions. In addition, there have been attempts to clarify, through qualitative research with service users/survivors, key elements in accounts of recovery from distress (Adame & Hornstein, 2006;Adame & Knudson, 2008;Cohen, 2005;Ochocka, Nelson, & Janzen, 2005;Young & Ensing, 1999). This range of competing versions means that specific concepts of recovery are often vague.…”

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“…This article challenges research that focuses on identifying typologies within firstperson narratives of madness (Adame & Hornstein, 2006) and the temporal ordering of chaotic narratives (Sells et al, 2003). It also challenges research that suggests that madness is characterised by narrative impoverishment (Lysaker P. H. & Lysaker, J. T., 2006) and loss of selfhood (Roe & Davidson, 2005).…”

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