For this podcast episode, three fine art students from the MFA Fine Art programme at HDK-Valand reached out to one PhD student in social work, to talk about lacking a language for one's lived experience, and its consequences on one's mental health. We talk about existentialism and the body, medicalisation and over-diagnosis, and the potential of finding a new language to talk about those aspects of depression that might lie beyond society’s ready-made metaphors.
Bios:
Elias Tärnström is a PhD student in the department for social work at Gothenburg university. His upcoming thesis focuses on patients diagnosed with depression's experiences of lacking a language for their depression. It aims to highlight the importance of being understood from existential aspects of one's experiences of depression during treatment interactions with professionals.
Vanja Qvarfordt explores her own family's archive of photographs and homemade films to investigate how mental illness has been passed down through three generations of women, and the effects of stigma and silence culture on that inheritance.
Marie Bergqvist works with how the dominant narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption in "colorblind Sweden" fails to recognize the complex experiences of being adopted, for instance by replacing the term race with ethnicity.
Jakob Niedziela critically examines the medicalising language surrounding ADHD, and its structural impact on ADHDers, on an individual and group level. In his current work, he is looking at the potential of tactility and body language functioning as neurodivergent mother-tongues.
The Dialogues Podcast Project is a podcast series produced by students from the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme at the HDK-Valand Academy – Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, and published by K103 Gothenburg Student Radio.

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