This section of the project adopts a reflexive autoethnographic approach.
Autoethnography is a qualitative method that connects personal experience with wider cultural and social meanings, allowing lived experience to be interpreted alongside academic analysis.
In this context, the reflections presented here do not function (only) as narrative autobiography, but as structured and critical responses to the discourses identified in the CDA section.
They explore how public representations of mental health may intersect with, differ from, or shape lived and intergenerational experiences of mental health.
Blog Post List
Medicalisation, Legitimisation and Lived Continuity
It took me ten years to get officially diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder – a mental illness I knew I had the moment I heard about in my post-secondary Psychology class. There was a wave of clarity that swept over as I felt my eye twitching again. That day, I had to hold back tears…
Stigma in Language
Stigma surrounding mental health does not appear to me as something loud or explicit. It is more subtle than that – it exists in what is left unsaid, or in the way certain topics are softened in conversation. It also exists in the way mental health is often indirectly referred to in personal or family…
Silence and Responsibility
Having a mental illness means being in a constant balance between silence and speaking up. How much can you say? How far is too far? No one talks about the weight of mental illness – how it feels like having an extra limb, but not everyone can see it. There is also a lot of…
Shame and Inheritance
I sat and waited in the hospital, waiting to hear from the team of doctors. My father, sisters, and I take shifts in the waiting room, making sure that there was always someone there, and that my mother was never left alone – even when she didn’t know we were there. We all use our…
The aim of this section is to provide a reflective lens through which discourse can be understood not only as language in use, but also as something that is experienced, internalised, and negotiated in everyday life.