Stories of acceptance and resistance: illness identity construction in athletes (mis)diagnosed with a personality disorder
Mental illness identities are personally and socially constructed and impact psychological wellbeing. This study explored how athletes diagnosed with a personality disorder construct their illness identity and the various ways this impacted experience. Guided by an interpretivist paradigm, we recruited two powerlifters, Samantha and Alex, who engaged in a series of one-to-one interviews. In total, 11 hours of data was collected and analysed using dialogical narrative analysis. The personality disorder diagnosis had significant but divergent influences on each athlete. Samantha accepted the diagnosis, aligning to dominant medical understandings of mental illness and using these to construct renewed understandings of the self. In contrast, Alex told a counternarrative to dominant medical discourses of mental illness, which was characterised by stories of activism. Alex sought an alternate diagnosis, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which better validated their experience. We discuss implications of this work for those operating in sport, such as the importance of allowing athletes to develop their own understandings of mental illness to allow for the construction of an authentic self.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and HealthVolume
16Issue
2Pages
117-133Publisher
Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Acceptance date
2023-10-11Publication date
2023-10-17Copyright date
2023ISSN
2159-676XeISSN
2159-6778Publisher version
Language
- en