Let's talk about it! But how?

Context

Talking about the experience of mental illness can help the recovery process. Societal taboos, stigma, feelings of sadness and shame, and the unfamiliarity of the experience however mean that talking about mental illness is often a challenging task.

About the project

This research project seeks to explore from linguistic, psychiatric and experienced perspectives how it can succeed nevertheless. Which communicative strategies are helpful for conversations with relatives, employers and friends?

To this purpose, we gather conversations on mental illness in different contexts and analyse them with a variety of mainly qualitative (content- and conversation analysis) methods. Thereby, we seek to identify communicative resources that enable us to share experiences of mental illness and to put them into words.