Navigating the Storm to Recovery through the Pictorial Representations of Persons in the Recovery Phase from Unipolar Depression
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Research Design
2.2. Participants
2.3. Data Collection
2.4. Procedure
2.5. Data Analysis
3. Results
3.1. The New Me in Me
“I mean, in the sense that if you don’t participate in life, contribute, if you don’t socialise… what is there? You might be alive physically but not emotionally… it’s flatlining in the sense that the heart has stopped, life has stopped. From that point of view, so it’s not a death wish. Life as I knew it, and as I wanted it to be, had stopped.” Clara, p. 7, lines 1–6.
“I stayed in bed for a whole month, I was so exhausted I didn’t wash, I hardly ate, maybe every five days or something like that…but nothing was important to me anymore. And my laptop, well, my work laptop, the battery has gone completely, so I haven’t even checked the many thousands of emails that are probably in… It’s just another thing that needs to be done, sometime in the future” Clara, p. 5, lines 49–54.
“So, with the depression, obviously, I was comforting myself a lot with food, and I gained fifteen kilos. I mean, now I’ve stopped and I’m feeling good but it’s going to be difficult to lose that weight now. And like suddenly, a bunch of my clothes weren’t fitting me anymore…it’s hard. And it’s hard to love myself from the outside sometimes” Daniela, p. 3, lines 41–46.
“You feel so insignificant and so small that you don’t even want to take up any space in the room. Even though there is ample space, you just want to be small” Daniela, p, 6, lines 32–34.
“I wouldn’t put any effort into my friendships, so eventually you start to push people away. How long will people continue to message you if you continue to give them abrupt answers? …if I saw that someone doesn’t want to speak to me, I would try maybe once or twice and that’s all. I understand them one hundred percent. It’s not nice having the company of a depressed person. It isn’t…I didn’t even like my own company, so other people didn’t like my company either.” Daniela, p. 2, lines 27–34.
“I would start to feel angry, and I would begin to snap at people who spoke to me. I always feel very sad and guilty after. Even when I raise my voice a little bit, that’s not me. I tend to be like a doormat, and everyone treads over me.” Karl, p. 3, lines 2–4.
“But now, I feel that I’m sinking fast because…I don’t have the skills (to fight the depression). If I had the skills, I would fight. But as it is I question… I’m fighting against what?” Steven, p.4, lines 3–5.
“I have had suicidal thoughts and those are the moments of determination when I say, you know XX (expletive language), I don’t care about life anymore and this is what I want to do now with my life, just waste it away” Adam, p. 8, lines 36–38.
3.2. Life as an Amalgamation of Colour
“I tried taking a lot of pills (to terminate her life) …it did not work and I’m happy it didn’t because… Even though throughout the years, up until a few months ago I still had those thoughts, but I knew that since it didn’t work that time, that I’m still alive for some reason. I’m still trying to figure out the reason but, like, I know I’m still here for a reason” Daniela, p. 4, lines 46–50.
“It (the field) revolves around me and wraps me like a blanket. It’s one of the few places where I can do whatever I want. If I feel like planting seeds, I can do that, if I feel like doing something else, I can do whatever I want to” Karl, p. 6, lines 13–16.
“Well, you must have a bit of courage to move forward. Not any special amount, but you must try to continue living with what God has given you” Karl, p. 3, lines 44–46.
“If you don’t at least try to be positive, you cannot move forward. Even now, I’m going through some difficult things, but I try to focus on the positive because if I focus too much on the negative, I will end up in bed. The fact that I’m currently doing well with the medication and the TMS (Transcranial magnetic stimulation) means that I can cope with these difficult circumstances” Karl, p. 7, lines 33–39.
4. Discussion
4.1. Navigating the Storm to Recovery
4.2. Limitations
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
- World Health Organisation. Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders: Global Health Estimates. 2017. Available online: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/depression-global-health-estimates (accessed on 15 May 2022).
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed.; American Psychiatric Publishing: Arlington, VA, USA, 2013. [Google Scholar]
- Spandler, H.; Secker, J.; Kent, L.; Hacking, S.; Shenton, J. Catching life: The contribution of arts initiatives to recovery approaches in mental health. J. Psychiatr. Ment. Health Nurs. 2007, 14, 791–799. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed] [Green Version]
- Malchiodi, C.A. Expressive arts therapy and multimodal approaches. In Handbook of art Therapy; Malchiodi, C.A., Ed.; The Guilford Press: New York, NY, USA, 2003; pp. 106–117. [Google Scholar]
- American Psychological Association. APA Clinical Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Depression across 3 Age Cohorts. 2019. Available online: https://www.apa.org/depression-guideline/guideline.pdf (accessed on 23 September 2022).
- Zubala, A.; MacIntyre, D.J.; Karkou, V. Evaluation of a brief art psychotherapy group for adults suffering from mild to moderate depression: Pilot pre, post and follow-up study. Int. J. Art Ther. 2016, 22, 106–117. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [Green Version]
- Hussain, S.A. Is this what depression looks like? Visual narratives of depression on social media. Vis. Stud. 2020, 35, 245–259. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Coll-Florit, M.; Climent, S.; Sanfilippo, M.; Hernández-Encuentra, E. Metaphors of Depression. Studying First Person Accounts of Life with Depression Published in Blogs. Metaphor Symb. 2021, 36, 1–19. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Rønberg, M.T. Living under a diagnostic description: Navigating images, metaphors, and sounds of depression. Subjectivity 2019, 12, 171–191. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Thorne, D. Images on the void: An enquiry into the nature of depression through reflections on five commonly presented images. Int. J. Art Ther. 2011, 16, 20–29. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- McCance, T.; McCormack, B. The Person-centred framework. In Fundamentals of Person- Centred Healthcare Practice; McCormack, B., McCance, T., Bulley, C., Brown, D., McMillan, A., Martin, S., Eds.; Wiley Blackwell: Oxford, UK, 2021; pp. 24–32. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, J.A.; Flowers, P.; Larkin, M. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Theory, Method and Research; Sage: London, UK, 2009. [Google Scholar]
- Polit, D.F.; Beck, C.T. Essentials of Nursing Research; Wolters Kluwer: Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2010. [Google Scholar]
- Lincoln, Y.S.; Guba, E.G. Naturalistic Inquiry; Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA, 1985. [Google Scholar]
- Karkou, V.; Omylinska-Thurston, J.; Parsons, A.; Nair, K.; Starkey, J.; Haslam, S.; Thurston, S.; Marshall, L.D. Bringing creative psychotherapies to primary NHS Mental Health Services in the UK: A feasibility study on patient and staff experiences of arts for the blues workshops delivered at Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services. Couns. Psychother. Res. 2022, 22, 616–628. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Palmer, V.J.; Furler, J. A room with a view: A metaphor analysis of Vietnamese women’s representations of living with depression using photo elicitation. Vis. Stud. 2018, 33, 251–263. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Fussel, S.R. Conventional Metaphors for depression. In The Verbal Communication of Emotions; Fussel, S.R. Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2002; pp. 167–181. [Google Scholar]
- Charteris-Black, J. Shattering the Bell Jar: Metaphor, Gender, and Depression. Metaphor Symb. 2012, 27, 199–216. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Banks, D.; Scerri, J.; Adamson, J. Being person-centred in mental health services. In Fundamentals of Person- Centred Healthcare Practice; McCormack, B., McCance, T., Bulley, C., Brown, D., McMillan, A., Martin, S., Eds.; Wiley Blackwell: Oxford, UK, 2021; pp. 209–218. [Google Scholar]
- Willis, J.; Ross, T. Misery Moo; Andersen Press: London, UK, 2006. [Google Scholar]
- Church, I. The Picture of Madness–Visual Narratives of Female Mental Illness in Contemporary Children’s Literature. Child. Lit. Educ. 2016, 49, 119–139. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Soga, M.; Gaston, K.J.; Yamaura, Y. Gardening is beneficial for health: A meta-analysis. Prev. Med. Rep. 2016, 5, 92–99. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Dein, S. Religion, spirituality and depression: Implications for research and treatment. Prim. Care Community Psychiatry 2006, 11, 67–72. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Szcześniak, M.; Falewicz, A.; Strochalska, K.; Rybarski, R. Anxiety and Depression in a Non-Clinical Sample of Young Polish Adults: Presence of Meaning in Life as a Mediator. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 6065. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
Super-Ordinate Theme | Themes | Sub-Themes |
---|---|---|
Navigating the storm to recovery | The New me in me |
|
Life as an amalgamation of colour |
|
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. |
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
Scerri, J.; Bonnici, A. Navigating the Storm to Recovery through the Pictorial Representations of Persons in the Recovery Phase from Unipolar Depression. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 13426. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192013426
Scerri J, Bonnici A. Navigating the Storm to Recovery through the Pictorial Representations of Persons in the Recovery Phase from Unipolar Depression. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2022; 19(20):13426. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192013426
Chicago/Turabian StyleScerri, Josianne, and Amy Bonnici. 2022. "Navigating the Storm to Recovery through the Pictorial Representations of Persons in the Recovery Phase from Unipolar Depression" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 20: 13426. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192013426