'Emotional Darkness without Solutions': Subjective Experiences of Mental Health Crisis

The purpose of this study is to explore and describe service users’ subjective experiences of mental health crisis. The main research question is: How do people with severe mental health problems experience and understand mental health crisis? Based on a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology, in-depth interviews with seven participants have been carried out to encourage reflections on mental health crisis experiences. The findings reveal the crisis as being complex and multifaceted, which contains two dimensions in experiencing crisis—an existential dimension (personal) and a contextual (social) dimension. Three main themes identified through the analysis, “Feeling out of control,” “Emotional darkness,” and “Loneliness and seeking togetherness”. Mental health crisis is experienced as chaos, losing control, loss of energy, and feelings of hopelessness. During mental health crisis, one’s social life can be difficult and involve many paradoxes and daily challenges. However, the participants revea...