The Lived Experience of Suffering Among Transitional-Age Youth with Mental Disorders: A Phenomenological Thematic Analysis

We identified five themes. First, for participants, suffering meant enduring "mental pain," an aversive and inescapable experience, often tied to suicidality. Second, this pain was described as submerging their reality, disrupting their sense of time, world, and self. Third, participants struggled to explain this pain to others and themselves. Fourth, they nonetheless thought it to be abnormal and to require professional help, as it signaled the presence of a mental disorder. Lastly, they reported the underlying cause of their mental pain as having no place in the world, due to patterns of social adversity or an inability to meet social expectations Conclusion: For these TAY, suffering was tied to a damaged social sense of self, fueled by ideals of autonomy and self-improvement that are increasingly hard to achieve. Excessive suffering was often characterized as "depression" and many of their experiences did echo phenomenological accounts of depression. While prior definitions of suffering emphasize causes or outcomes, this study details the experiential core of suffering as mental pain. However, some participants distinguished between pain as an immediate pre-reflective experience and suffering as its reflective aftermath. This supports the view that clinicians must address not only the raw experience but also help patients build meaning from it, bridging symptom relief with narrative understanding.