Functionality as defence: A deep-structure hermeneutic study of institutional coping and professional identity during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article examines how healthcare professionals working on COVID-19 wards experienced psychosocial burdens during the pandemic and how they managed these within the intersecting pressures of personal vulnerability, professional duty, and institutional expectation. Drawing on deep-structure hermeneutics, 13 qualitative interviews were analysed to explore latent meaning structures underlying professional discourse. From this corpus, one analytically rich interview was selected for an in-depth single-case analysis. It illustrates how a rhetoric of positivity and a strictly maintained professional role served as protective defences against anxiety, helplessness, and loss of control. Within this dynamic, functionality emerged as a latent mode of coping that re-established a sense of agency and order, yet simultaneously suppressed emotional expression and acknowledgement of personal needs. These findings reveal a psychosocial paradox at the heart of clinical work under crisis conditions: maintaining reliability and composure while risking emotional detachment and exhaustion. As a theoretically informed implication of these findings, we propose the potential value of "spaces of non-functioning"-temporary contexts that allow relief from performance demands without destabilising professional identity. Such protected spaces may provide a more sustainable balance between care for others and self-care within the culture of contemporary healthcare.