Metaphoric language in Mental Health: A Window to Lived Experience of Service Users and a Tool in Recovery

Mental health research increasingly recognises language as central to how service users communicate distress, identity, relationships and recovery. Metaphors can make complex or difficult-to-verbalise experiences more accessible, while also shaping how those experiences are understood in therapy. However, important questions remain about whose metaphors are used, how their meanings are negotiated, and whether therapist-generated metaphors are experienced as helpful, alienating or harmful. Existing studies suggest that metaphors may support emotional expression, therapeutic alliance, reappraisal and meaning-making, but their effects are not universal. Interpretations can be influenced by culture, identity, diagnosis, therapeutic orientation and personal history. Recent work on embodied cognition also indicates that psychological experiences may be remembered and communicated through bodily sensations with metaphorical qualities, such as carrying weight on the shoulders or feeling emotionally numb. Despite these developments, research remains fragmented across psychotherapy traditions and has paid insufficient attention to service users’ own metaphoric themes, negative experiences and embodied forms of meaning-making. A more systematic and collaborative investigation is therefore needed.This Research Topic aims to examine how metaphoric language functions within mental health care and psychotherapy, with particular attention to service users’ lived experiences. It will explore how metaphors emerge across therapy, how meanings are collaboratively negotiated, and how service users use metaphors to communicate, interpret and transform experiences of distress and recovery. The Research Topic will also consider whether metaphors differ in their effects across diverse populations and therapeutic schools, and under what conditions therapist-delivered metaphors facilitate or impede therapeutic engagement. Contributions may address questions about the relationship between metaphor, embodied cognition, memory, identity, emotional regulation and agency, as well as the ethical implications of introducing metaphors into clinical work.To gather further insights into metaphor in psychotherapy and service user experiences, this Research Topic will focus on qualitative, quantitative, theoretical and practice-based research examining metaphor across mental health contexts. Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:- Service users’ metaphoric themes and patterns across therapy- Service users’ experiences of co-constructed and therapist-delivered metaphors- Collaborative negotiation of metaphorical meanings in therapy- Experiences of common psychotherapy metaphors among culturally and socially diverse groups- Differences in metaphor use across therapeutic schools and modalities- How service users make meaning of metaphors in relation to distress, identity and recovery- Negative, confusing or harmful experiences of therapist-generated metaphors- Metaphor, therapeutic alliance, communication and shared understanding- Embodied metaphoric cognition in service users’ experiences- Bodily sensations, memory and metaphorical representations of emotional experience- Metaphor, agency, transformation and recovery-oriented practice- Ethical and culturally responsive approaches to using metaphor in mental health careroaches to using metaphor in mental health care Topic editors: Fiona Mathieson, Jennifer Jordan, Niklas Törneke Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86379/metaphoric-language-in-mental-health-a-window-to-lived-experience-of-service-users-and-a-tool-in-recovery