Meaning-Making in Everyday Occupation at a Psychiatric Centre: A Narrative Approach

Abstract

Experiences of meaning in everyday life are crucial for everyone, including people with mental illness, who often have specific challenges in providing themselves with engaging occupation and social relations. However, how meaning occurs in the occupational context of mental health care situations is unclear. This article draws upon an ethnographic study of social relations at a psychiatric centre, and explores how processes of meaning-making take place in everyday occupation among people with mental illness. The focus was on-going meaning-making processes that emerged during everyday occupation in social situations. Data were collected and analysed using a narrative approach, based on Ricoeur's theory of narrative and action. Our findings show how engagement in the occupation based milieu therapy at the centre opened up processes. Our narrative analyses present three analytical layers of meaning-making: 1) identifying an emergent story; 2) interpretation of emergent meaning-making; and 3) theoretical explanation of narrative-in-action. The findings further demonstrate how these processes were closely linked to the participants' everyday occupation in social situations, and how engagement in small-talk created a social fellowship and shared meaning. We identified how doing everyday occupations with others created opportunities for narrative meaning in the present moment.