Paper short abstract:

The paper explores ways that feelings intersect with language among Danish psychiatric patients with depression. Within a moral climate where the best outcome for many is acceptance of being sick, there also exists some discourse, drawing on notions of faith and healing, that boosts social agency.

Paper long abstract:

A study of people in a psychiatric hospital receiving treatment for major depression. The paper explores how these patients engaged with the various treatments in ways that were social, bodily and spiritual. It will be shown how modes of bodily agency corresponded with the language people used to express their condition.Central themes will be: the different ways in which patients expressed feelings; the extent to which they believed their feelings were connected with their depression; how feeligns were connected with an experience of healing; and whether experiences of healing took place without any reference to feelings.