Abstract Crises have usually been considered temporary states of exception, but research is increasingly exploring slower, less visible, and more chronic crises, acknowledging that they differ in their characteristics and experiences. Echoing these shifts, we explore how crises and ruptures resonate through time. Using natural language processing and conventional qualitative methodologies to analyse diaries written over more than two decades, we noticed that events people reported as personal ruptures did not always correspond to societal crises. Instead, they often invoked other crises meaningful to them. The ruptures were also rarely experienced as isolated events but, at times, seemed to “resonate” with one another on different grounds. These resonances could either mitigate or amplify how crises and ruptures were experienced. Based on an analysis of one diary, written by a man in his seventies from the southern United States, we theorise three characteristics of resonances: temporal, embodied, and cumulative. We argue that resonance may also influence whether the crisis becomes a rupture, how it is made sense of, and acted upon – in other words, whether it contributes to the person’s development.

Abstract This article explores how persistent school absenteeism becomes institutionally organised as mental health problems through the case of Emma, a pupil in a Norwegian compulsory school. Drawing on institutional ethnography and inspired by Dorothy Smith’s essay “K Is Mentally Ill,” I examine how two of Emma’s teachers came to understand and respond to her situation as a case of “anxiety” and “school refusal”—despite her withdrawal from both school and follow-up, and the presence of plausible alternative explanations. The analysis demonstrates how their actions were shaped by institutional texts and accountability regimes that rendered psychological framings not only legitimate but also necessary. I argue that this framing was sustained by a dominant institutional discourse of “returning to school”, in which school attendance comes to be treated as the unquestioned solution to pupil distress. The article highlights how such discourse narrows the interpretive repertoire available to professionals, often excluding social or structural explanations and limiting children’s opportunities to be heard on their own terms.