Description

Fathers, Fatherhood and Mental Illness provides the first book-length study examining fathers' experiences of mental illness. It argues that a discourse analytic focus upon the experience of mental illness offers important insights not only to social scientists but also to mental health scholars and practitioners. Using micro-analytic discourse analysis, it shows that mental illness introduces feelings of failure and rejection in fatherhood, stripping away its socially expected authority. This causes an added degree of suffering to mentally ill fathers, as the idea of what it means to be a 'good father' is undermined by mental illness, thus meaning that fathers with a mental illness must carefully manage their identities and relationships. The book finishes with a postulate of a stronger focus on the discursive form of how mentally ill people account for their experiences and thus on their suffering.