Representing Madness: How Are Subjective Experiences of Emotional Distress Presented in First-Person Accounts?

Abstract

Close to 600 first-person narratives of madness have been published in English alone, offering invaluable insight into emotional distress from a rarely studied perspective. The goals of this study were (a) to analyze how writers of such narratives present their subjective experience of emotional distress in terms of narrative structure and voice and (b) to examine how the author's purpose in writing the narrative affects its form. Previous studies of physical illness narratives have shown that they can be categorized into types based on structure and style.We asked: Are emotional distress narratives similar, or do they constitute a unique form? Ten such narratives were analyzed, with respect to the following four dimensions: writer's subjective experience, narrative structure, voice, and purpose. The results suggest a typology of narratives of emotional distress that is quite distinct from those constructed for physical illness.