Personal encounters and the conversations that take place during these interactions play a central role in dealing with mental illness: Thus, traditionally, talking is at the core of psychiatric-psychotherapeutic diagnosis and treatment (McCabe et al. 2016). But it is equally important outside the clinical context where talking about the illness experience with family, friends and other non-professionals is increasingly recognised as an important means to foster personal recovery, social inclusion and to lessen the societal stigma attached to mental illness (Gaebel et al. 2017). Whilst so much hinges on talking, it is widely acknowledged however that talking about mental illness is fraught with challenges: How can these experiences that are deeply personal, at first new and often bewildering for the person herself be put into words and thereby be shared with others? How can this be done despite societal stigmas and taboos? And how can these experiences be expressed in our everyday language? In our on-going study ‘Let’s talk about it! But how?’ we combine linguistic and psychiatric perspectives with a view to identifying communicative resources that are used to meet these challenges. The project is based on elicited and natural conversations with mental health service users, their relatives and health professionals. Methodologically, conversation- and content analysis are combined within a participatory paradigm (Beresford 2013). Here, we present first findings focussing on linguistic means and narrative strategies used to share experiences of mental illness through language (Günthner 2006; Brünner & Gülich 2002). We ask how sociocultural contexts and linguistic strategies influence the communication about mental illness, how subjective perceptions and emotions are structured through language and – by implication – how linguistic means and illness experiences are intertwined. We close with tentative ideas how such research can contribute to the empowerment of service users and to improve clinical practice.
