Daily Life After the First Psychiatric Hospitalization

Abstract

Returning to daily life after a psychiatric hospitalization is described as complicated and challenging. Based on a phenomenological study centered on the lived experience of people who returned to everyday life after the first hospitalization in a psychiatric unit, the authors aim to focus on the emerging metaphors that stood out from the participants' narratives as they express, in a particularly vocative manner, the primordial meanings of their lived experience during this period. Through these metaphors, they capture the intrinsic pre-reflective conceptualizations of this phenomenon and, therefore, produce understandings of how this phenomenon is experientially lived. The unique word sequence that each participant chose to describe their experience pushes us to rethink the value of narrative within healthcare. This chapter elaborates how these metaphorical phenomenological findings can provide insights into this particular human phenomenon and contribute to more action-sensitive knowledge.