Stories of acceptance and resistance: illness identity construction in athletes (mis)diagnosed with a personality disorder

Abstract

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.