A journey from darkness to dawn: Metaphoric variation in depression recovery stories posted on Chinese Wechat subscription accounts

Abstract

Despite volumes of research on depression-related conceptual metaphors and the therapeutic function of client-generated metaphors, seldom efforts have been made to unveil clients’ positive changes signified by metaphoric variation in the context of recovery. Based on depression recovery stories posted on Chinese Wechat subscription accounts, this study unpicks evolved metaphoric patterns indicative of positive changes regarding altered attitudes toward depression, social interaction and healthcare services during depressed patients’ recovery. It is found that these varying patterns can be mostly decoded based on correspondence and class inclusion metaphor types, developing from specific original source-target relations or original elements of the sources, while the rest of them can be realized by the introduction of new sources or targets for elaborating new experience and outcomes. They reflect depression survivors’ positive thinking patterns, self-empowerment and resilience, and convey their experience-licensed suggestions and encouragement to peers. Additionally, this study discusses how the Chinese socio-cultural values play a vital role in the understanding of depression-related metaphors and their variation, and provides implications for the application of metaphoric techniques in healthcare practice with socio-cultural sensitivity.

Keywords

Conceptual metaphor / Correspondence metaphor type / Class inclusion metaphor type / depression

Funding

This study was supported by the Special Fund of Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Strategy under Grant no. pdjh2023b0193.

Ethical Statement

Our study did not require an ethical board approval because it did not contain human or animal trials.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lin Lin: Conceptualization, data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Rui Zhou: Conceptualization, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - review & editing. Jia-jia Wang: Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Lin Lin contributed to the conceptualization, methodology, data collection and analysis, and writing of this study. Rui Zhou and Jia-jia Wang provided crucial insights for the data interpretation, manuscript revision and development of this study from the mental health expert’s point of view. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully thank Prof. Shaomin Zhang for her useful suggestions and great encouragement. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable inputs.

Appendix

Specific reference list for formulating depression-related metaphors (adapted from Coll-Florit et al. 2021; Shi &Khoo, 2023)

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

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