Hilmar

Hilmar grew up in close proximity to the psychiatric hospital in which he now worked as a nurse. He came across as a reflective and articulate man with plenty of self-confidence. However, the telling of his story would soon reveal that it had not always been the case. The intimate entanglement of the personal and the professional in his life and narrative seemed to explain why he had, at different points in his life, and in different capacities, “ended up in psychiatry”. The chapter is a careful reading of his narrative account. Part of the rationale for the lengthy and detailed individual case write-up is to honor the sequence and manner of telling of the narrator, but also to demonstrate the richness and complexity in a single professional’s narrative account. Hence, there are many quotes included. This is both to ensure transparency and idiosyncrasy and to privilege the phenomenological aim of the study. The latter calls for an eliciting of the complexities evident in the account, before subjecting it, together with all cases, to interpretation and theoretical discussion in later chapters.