Dominant Psychiatric Explanations, Self-Narration, and Master Narratives

Abstract Dominant psychiatric explanations, i.e., explanations of why mental disorders or specific collections of psychiatric symptoms occur that are popular and widely adopted in a given community or society, can influence the self-narratives of people with psychiatric diagnoses. In this article, I resort to the literature on master narratives to systematically examine how dominant psychiatric explanations shape the self-narratives of people with psychiatric diagnoses and how these self-narratives are valued and perceived. To illustrate my claims, I use biomedical explanations of depression as a case study. When we experience mental ill-health, we may formulate a psychiatric self-narrative thread to understand these experiences, do justice to the changes in our embodied and affective experiences, and make our experiences understandable to others. In daily life, psychiatric explanations are frequently extended into psychiatric explanatory narratives that support claims about the lives of people with psychiatric diagnoses. The explanatory narratives of dominant psychiatric explanations can be characterized as master narratives that shape psychiatric self-narrative threads and how we and others value and perceive them. This characterization provides new insights into the relationship between dominant psychiatric explanatory narratives and two narrative values: the coherence of self-narratives and our ability to imagine possibilities for reducing our mental suffering. Hence, this article sheds new light on how dominant psychiatric explanations in general, and biomedical explanations of depression specifically, influence self-understanding.