A continuum of “normal” experience: Positioning mental health struggles as human experiences in the university context

This article explores how university students with mental health struggles engage in “illness-identity” work, the process by which an individual resituates their self in relation to their illness, using a phenomenological approach. Grounded in 24 semi-structured interviews with Canadian university students between the ages of 18 and 24 years who self-identify as experiencing mental health struggles, I argue that students do not perform illness-identity work by making the “I Am” or “I Have” illness identity statements commonly cited in the anthropological literature. Instead, these students focus on the phenomenological content of their struggles making what I call “I Experience” statements. In doing so these students normalize their struggles by understanding them as fluid and ephemeral experiences which exist as a continuum, refuting a construction of mental health struggles as discrete entities objectively present or not in the individual body.