“Kids… can you please understand us (parents)?”: The relationships between linguistic strategies and identities of parents with major depressive disorder from storytelling in the interview discourse

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to study the relationships between linguistic strategies and identities of parents with major depressive disorder from storytelling in the interview discourse. The data were collected by interviewing 5 parents with major depressive disorder using the concepts of discourse analysis and pragmatics as the research conceptual framework. The results showed that the parents with major depressive disorder used 8 linguistic strategies, namely lexical choice, metaphor, parallel structure, repetition, fallacy, expectation, self-questioning and conversational implicature. These linguistic strategies are related to two identities of the parents with major depressive disorder. Therefore, children have to understand the parents who are suffering from depression in order not to let it become the medical and public health problem that is related to national development.