I was very much a scapegoat in the family so they would come to me with all their problems, so it wasn't as if I felt that they were able to help me with what my issues were. So, I think sort of for a long time I found myself very boxed in, very sort of trying to worry about everybody else and not myself and it obviously built up and just came out of me at sort of fourteen. (DP15 female, 14) The most common metaphor in this group was that of physical emergence from depression experienced as a container, and this was indicated by verbs such as ‘come out’, ‘pour out’, ‘escape’, and ‘release’. This group of metaphors accounted for 29% of metaphors used by men and 20% of metaphor used by women. Containment metaphors most commonly represent the depression as a three-dimensional container that has a depth and a physical base from which the depressed person usually needs to ‘come out’: this verbal metaphor was one of the most common in all the interviews. However, as I have indicated above, ‘come out’ was also used was to describe the depression as being trapped within the self. There is therefore a contrast between whether the self is experienced as the container, or the depression is experienced as the container. For example, in the following the self is experienced as the container: And I thought, well, obviously I've got this that needs to come out. [um], And this is one of the interesting things about it, although it's... you are putting something out, another way you can think of it as allowing something which wants to come out of you, to come out. (DP13 male, 39)
R:> The rigidity had to be broken down. I mean, after the first depression, my [um] the religious binding, as it were, and I think religious, religion means that which is bound, but that had to be completely.... that was completely knocked out of me. R:> What, in my case, it's broken me down so I can be rebuilt. <I: Right. R:> Or so I can rebuild myself. And I'm not saying everybody needs depression they don't. But if life's circumstances, or one's path, has led one to a place where you can't go any further, then something has to be broken in order for rebuilding to take place. (DP28 female, 20) In this extract metaphor entailments of building up and breaking down imply the creation and destruction of a container; the use of one containment metaphors primes another to produce ‘come out’, ‘poured out’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘breakdown’ and ‘bound’ etc. It is also the case that the interviewer facilitates this priming of metaphor by reformulating the metaphor ‘broken down’ by introducing the word ‘rigidity’ that is then taken up by the respondent in the last exchange and is reminiscent of Burns (2007) ‘collaborative’ metaphors. It may be that this more emotionally expressive use of metaphor is something that comes more naturally to therapists who are working with women as compared with men and that in this respect gender use of metaphor is at least partially co-constructed.
And I tell myself that if you don't hit the bottom, you don't really know what the good things are. So when I felt absolutely as if I'd hit the rock bottom, it was starting then to feel quite joyful because I knew it was going to get better, and gradually it did.... Yes I did. Yeh I could then see this cyclical pattern, it was like being on a scenic railway you know. You'd drop down into the depths and then hit the heights. The heights were very good for [er] thinking up schemes, and some of them were a bit over the top maybe, but I got to use it if that's the right thing. (DP01 male, 35) Here the metaphor ‘hit’ is reiterated several times, as is ‘drag’ in the following: …..developed consciousness in this warm safe environment and suddenly dragged out to bright cold. I've got forcep marks there, that's where I was dragged out, that's where they turned my head with the forceps. (DP23 male, 50) Discussion Linguistic analysis of metaphor suggests the potential for its role in revealing the concepts underlying the experience of depression as well as communicating the emotional intensity of the experience to listeners. However metaphor mixing may be more effective in doing this than metaphor repetition. Metaphors are like a series of
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