ABSTRACT

The stories told by people with a serious mental illness (SMI) are a genre with important psychological functions. These narratives do not simply mirror people’s experiences but scaffold coherence in suffering and symptoms. That is to say, illness narratives make it possible for experiences often hidden in a private sphere to enter the social world through participation in different social discourses and reorient identity and agency. In the last three decades, the recovery model in mental health has radically transformed approaches to understanding the experiences of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, rebooting person-focused health and social care services. In this model, recovery does not involve a return to the state prior to diagnosis or a symptomatic improvement, but a reconstruction of the identity and a search for personal meanings in life. Considering that narratives are fundamental semiotic tools for the construction of our identity, the stories told by people experiencing mental health challenges become fundamental to the model of recovery. In other words, the study of the narratives of people living with serious mental illness is constitutive of the recovery model. In Western culture, a prevalent image for mental illness or more popularly “madness”, not least in the work of Dante in The Divine Comedy, is that of descent into hell. In this sense, the term “katabasis” for “going down” refers to the descent to the underworld in Greek mythology. The opposite concept, “anabasis”, for “going up”, denotes an ascendant journey. We will consider results from empirical researches into narrative and serious mental illness to discuss what a recovery narrative means in this frame of “going down” and “going up”. In negotiating coherence and agency, narratives of people diagnosed with SMI often remain in tension between katabasis and anabasis. This chapter explores the narratives and discursive characteristics of stories from people diagnosed with SMIs such as schizophrenia in order to elucidate narrative repercussions of this polarizing dynamic and its relevance to the notion of recovery in contemporary approaches to mental health.