Abstract
Living with anxiety can be a complex, biopsychosocial experience that is unique to each person and embedded in their contexts and lived worlds. Scales and questionnaires are necessary to quantify anxiety, yet these approaches are not always able to reflect the lived experience of psychological distress experienced by youth. Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, our research aimed to amplify the voices of youth living with anxiety. Fifty-eight youth living with anxiety took part in in-depth, open-ended interviews and participatory arts-based methods (photovoice and ecomaps). Analysis was informed by van Manen’s method of data analysis with attention to lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived relationships, as well as the meanings of living with anxiety. Youth relied on the following metaphors to describe their experiences: A shrinking world; The heavy, heavy backpack; Play, pause, rewind, forward; and A fine balance. Overall, youth described their anxiety as a monster, contributing to feelings of fear, loss, and pain, but also hope. The findings from this study can contribute to the reduction of barriers in knowledge translation by encouraging the use of narrative and visual metaphors as a communicative tool to convey youth’s lived experience of anxiety to researchers, clinicians, and the public.
Highlights
The burden of mental illness for young people across the world is growing in magnitude [1], more than ever [2], and especially as they find themselves disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic [3]
To help generate understanding around the experiences of living with an anxiety disorder, youth relied on metaphors to describe their experiences and how they navigate the world, with attention to Van Manen’s theoretical concepts of lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived relationships
Youth used photovoice as a metaphor itself, with the photovoice process allowing them to make representations of their anxiety and its manifestations that could be shared with others in order to generate understanding
Summary
The burden of mental illness for young people across the world is growing in magnitude [1], more than ever [2], and especially as they find themselves disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic [3]. The need for context-specific understandings of the mental health experiences of adolescents has been identified as a one of the major gaps in global research [11]. Measures such as scales and questionnaires are necessary to quantify anxiety, yet these approaches risk not adequately reflecting the lived experience of psychological distress across individuals and settings [12]. Living with a mental illness, including anxiety [13] and depression [14], is a complex, biopsychosocial experience that is unique to each person and embedded in their contexts and lived worlds. Our research aimed to amplify the voices of youth living with anxiety and highlight salient metaphors (narrative and visual) of the lived experience of anxiety that make knowledge more available and applicable to others
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