The subjective and objective side of helplessness: Navigating between reassurance and risk management when people seek help for suicidal others.

Social psychologists interested in interaction have demonstrated that help-seeking is a fruitful area for understanding how people relate to one another, but there is insufficient knowledge on how people navigate emotional involvement in help activities. Drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, this article examines third-party calls to a crisis helpline, with emergency calls as a point of comparison, to see how participants manage emotional involvement related to callers' concerns for others. The analysis unpacks how participants orient to helplessness-callers' uncertainty and inability to move forward-as justifying a focus on the at-risk person or on the caller's emotions. While dispatchers at emergency centres work to get pertinent information to send help, call-takers at the crisis helpline are trained to offer emotional support. In the latter case, a caller's displays of helplessness may be treated as a sign of danger for the person at-risk, but it can also be taken as a disposition to worry, warranting a focus on the caller's emotional state. Showing how participants manage this challenge as they navigate 'whom to help', the paper contributes to research on the accomplishment of subjectivity and objectivity and demonstrates the utility of this framework in suicide prevention.

Red-pilled mama bears and enlightened power goddesses: Discursive constructions of feminine identities in a conspiracy theory space.

Previous research into the gendered social identity work involved in conspiracy theories (CTs) has largely focused on expressions of masculinity. The present study investigates the employment and mobilization of feminine identities in online Covid-19 conspiracy theory seminars through a critical discursive psychological perspective. The analysis finds three interpretative repertoires for representing the pandemic: the totalitarianism repertoire, the corrupt medical profession repertoire and the awakening repertoire. The most prominent feminine subject position constructed in relation to these repertoires is a maternal identity that functions as a category entitlement: mothers are represented as having a unique viewpoint on the purported pandemic conspiracy by virtue of their supposed inherent morality and concern for the welfare of children. Mothers are depicted as the cultural reproducers of the group, tasked with keeping the(ir) children safe from the influence of the conspiracy. Moreover, women are persuaded to take part in anti-conspiracy action by drawing on notions of empowerment, self-actualization, and sisterhood. These findings suggest that feminine identities, and maternal identities in particular, play a key role in the mobilizing power of CTs.

How a 'good parent' decides on childhood vaccination. Demonstrating independence and deliberation during Dutch healthcare visits.

Childhood vaccination consultations are considered an important phase in parents' decision-making process. To date, only a few empirical studies conducted in the United States have investigated real-life consultations. To address this gap, we recorded Dutch vaccination conversations between healthcare providers and parents during routine health consultations for their newborns. The data were analysed using Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology. We found that the topic of vaccination was often initiated with 'Have you already thought about vaccination?' (HYATAV), and that this formulation was consequential for parental identity work. Exploring the interactional trajectories engendered by this initiation format we show that: (1) interlocutors treat the question as consisting of two types of queries, (2) conversational trajectories differ according to which of the queries is attended to and that (3) parents work up a 'good parent' identity in response to HYATAV, by demonstrating that they think about their child's vaccination beforehand and make their decisions independently. Our findings shed new light on the interactional unfolding of parental vaccination decisions.

"I *know* all the things I should be doing ": accounting for mental health and illness in an online mental health discussion forum during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Mental health is highly correlated with a person's social and economic circumstances, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic made this connection uniquely visible. Yet a discourse of personal responsibility for mental health often dominates in mental health promotion campaigns, media coverage and lay understandings, contributing to the stigmatisation of mental ill-health. METHODS: In this study, we analysed how the concept of 'mental health' was discursively constructed in an online mental health peer-support forum in Australia during 2020, the period of the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. An approach informed by Critical Discursive Psychology was employed to analyse all posts made to a discussion thread entitled "Coping during the coronavirus outbreak" in 2020, a total of 1,687 posts. RESULTS: Two main interpretative repertoires concerning mental health were identified. Under the first repertoire, mental health was understood as resulting largely from the regular performance of a suite of self-care behaviours. Under the second repertoire, mental health was understood as resulting largely from external circumstances outside of the individual's control. The existence of two different repertoires of mental health created an ideological dilemma which posters negotiated when reporting mental ill-health. A recurring pattern of accounting for mental ill-health was noted in which posters employed a three-part concessive structure to concede Repertoire 1 amid assertions of Repertoire 2; and used disclaimers, justifications, and excuses to avoid negative typification of their identity as ignorant or irresponsible. CONCLUSIONS: Mental ill-health was commonly oriented to by forum posters as an accountable or morally untoward state, indicating the societal pervasiveness of a discourse of personal responsibility for mental health. Such discourses are likely to contribute to the stigmatisation of those suffering from mental ill-health. There is a need therefore for future communications about mental health to be framed in a way that increases awareness of social determinants, as well as for policy responses to effect material change to social determinants of mental health.

Understanding mixed emotions in organized helping through emotionography.

Introduction: Emotionography studies emotion: (a) as it occurs naturally in display, reception, attribution, and avowal; (b) within and across diverse stretches of interaction and varied institutional contexts; (c) grounded purposefully in the perspectives of the interactants as those perspectives are displayed in real-time through unfolding talk; (d) using materials that are recorded and transcribed in sufficient precision to capture the granularity consequential for the interactants. We overview contemporary research on "mixed emotion" highlighting theoretical and methodological issues and explore the potential of emotionography as a generative alternative. Methods: The analysis will use contemporary conversation analysis and discursive psychology to illuminate the workings of organized helping using a collection of recordings from a child protection helpline all of which include laughter alongside crying. Results: Analysis shows, on the one hand, how crying and upset display the caller's stance on the trouble being reported, and mark its action-relevant severity; on the other, how laughter manages ongoing parallel issues such as advice resistance. We show that the "mixture" is public and pragmatic, displaying different concerns and stances, and dealing with different issues; all is in the service of action. Discussion: When analyzing the specifics of interaction, the concept of "mixed emotion" loses clarity, and it is more accurate to observe competing pragmatic endeavors being pursued in an intricately coordinated fashion. These practices would not be captured by conventional emotion measurement tools such as scales, vignettes, or retrospective interviews. Broader implications for theories of emotion and methods of emotion research are discussed.

'Surely a little discretion isn't too difficult'? The discursive construction of discretion in users' comments on UK newspaper articles about public breastfeeding.

OBJECTIVE: This paper explores how discourses of discretion are constructed in online discussions about breastfeeding in public. METHOD AND MEASURES: We analysed 4204 online newspaper comment threads from 15 UK-based publications using Discursive Psychology. We explored how discretion was constructed and mobilised to facilitate discourses of breastfeeding in public. RESULTS: Indiscretion was used to construct dispositional traits of mothers typically associated with sexualised, immoral female behaviour and therefore incompatible with 'good' motherhood. Responsibility for preventing public upset was placed on breastfeeding mothers, whilst discretion was constructed as easily achievable, and therefore a reasonable expectation. By implication, women who chose not to be discreet, were constructed as deliberately provocative, and so not entitled to claim or protest negative treatment. Notably, within our data the relevance of discretion when breastfeeding in public appeared discursively difficult to reject or challenge. CONCLUSION: Our findings confirm empirically that support for public breastfeeding is constructed as contingent on mothers displaying discretion. Our analysis highlights the challenges for mothers and babies for whom breastfeeding is compromised by an unwillingness to feed in public, perhaps due to pervasive constructions of breastfeeding women as selfish, exhibitionist, inconsiderate and unfit mothers in public discourse. Finally, our findings demonstrate the practical accomplishment in everyday life of the type of constructions of breastfeeding women that have been powerfully conceptualised by previous researchers.

Challenges in preserving the "good doctor" norm: physicians' discourses on changes to the medical logic during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic was a tremendous challenge to the practice of modern medicine. In this study, we use neo-institutional theory to gain an in-depth understanding of how physicians in Sweden narrate how they position themselves as physicians when practicing modern medicine during the first wave of the pandemic. At focus is medical logic, which integrates rules and routines based on medical evidence, practical experience, and patient perspectives in clinical decision-making. Methods: To understand how physicians construct their versions of the pandemic and how it impacted the medical logic in which they practice, we analyzed the interviews from 28 physicians in Sweden by discursive psychology. Results: The interpretative repertoires showed how COVID-19 created an experience of knowledge vacuum in medical logic and how physicians dealt with clinical patient dilemmas. They had to find unorthodox ways to rebuild a sense of medical evidence while still being responsible for clinical decision-making for patients with critical care needs. Discussion: In the knowledge vacuum occurring during the first wave of COVID-19, physicians could not use their common medical knowledge nor rely on published evidence or their clinical judgment. They were thus challenged in their norm of being the "good doctor". One practical implication of this research is that it provides a rich empirical account where physicians are allowed to mirror, make sense, and normalize their own individual and sometimes painful struggle to uphold the professional role and related medical responsibility in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be important to follow how the tremendous challenge of COVID-19 to medical logic plays out over time in the community of physicians. There are many dimensions to study, with sick leave, burnout, and attrition being some interesting areas.

'All of a sudden for no reason they've been displaced': Constructing the 'contingent refugee' in early media reports on the Ukrainian refugees.

This paper analyzes descriptions of Ukrainian refugees in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Findings of previous research on news media descriptions of refugees point to problematic descriptions of refugees that downgrade their deservingness of refuge and treat refugee status as an inherent feature of fleeing individuals instead of as contingent on external circumstances. However, there is a widespread perception that Ukrainian refugees are being reported on in a more positive light. We therefore examine how news media describe these refugees. Our corpus includes English media news coverage from February 25, 2022, to March 25, 2022, the initial period of the invasion. A discursive psychological analysis of news interactions where hosts elicit information from correspondents about current ongoings with Ukrainian refugees shows that Ukrainian refugees are constructed as vulnerable, and their actions are treated as reasonable given the situation. These descriptions construct Ukrainian refugees as those who are only contingently refugees and legitimate help-giving by other parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight distinct, previously unanalyzed ways that refugees are constructed: contingent refugees. We discuss implications of our findings for understanding refugee inclusion and exclusion.

Leadership, mobilization of risky behaviours and accountability: The Church of Greece leaders' public talk during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social psychologists have typically examined leadership and risk-taking behaviours through a social identity lens. However, the rhetorical/ideological aspects of such processes as well as leaders' accountability management practices have not been adequately studied. We address this gap by focusing on leaders of the Church of Greece (CoG), who, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, insisted that their congregation should keep receiving the Holy Communion, which typically involves the practice of spoon-sharing. We present a discursive analysis of 17 interviews with leaders of the CoG given in Greek media channels, exploring how they construct participation in the ritual. When Church leaders urged their audiences to engage in risky practices, they assumed various social identity positions (e.g. scientifically informed; civic minded), implicating competing ideological frameworks. They also managed their personal and institutional accountability for potential viral transmissions by placing responsibility for adverse effects on their followers. Implications for social psychological theory are discussed.

Mental health rehabilitees' agency construction and promotion in community-based transitional work programme.

PURPOSE: The integration of mental health rehabilitees into the labour market is an important policy objective everywhere in the world. The international Clubhouse organization is a third-sector actor that offers community-based psychosocial rehabilitation and supports and promotes rehabilitees' state of acting and exerting power over their lives, including their (re)employment. In this article, we adopt the perspective of discursive psychology and ask how mental health rehabilitees' agency is constructed and ideally also promoted in the Clubhouse-based Transitional Employment (TE) programme. METHODS: The data consisted of 26 video-recorded TE meetings in which staff and rehabilitees of one Finnish Clubhouse discussed ways to further their contacts with potential employers. The analysis was informed by discursive psychology, which has been heavily influenced by conversation analysis. RESULTS: The analysis demonstrated how rehabilitees adopt agentic positions in respect to TE-related future activities, and how Clubhouse staff promote and encourage but also discourage and invalidate these agentic positionings. The analysis demonstrated the multifaceted nature of agency and agency promotion in the TE programme. CONCLUSIONS: Although ideally, Clubhouse activities are based on equal opportunities, in everyday interaction practices, the staff exercise significant power over the question whose agency is promoted and validated in the TE programme.

Talking about the experiences of racism: A study of reporting racism in broadcast interviews.

This study examines how experiences of racism are talked about during broadcast interviews. Inspired by discursive-psychological and conversation-analytic investigations on experience in interactions, this study approaches experience as a 'loose term' and as a participant's issue in the unfolding sequence of talks. The analysis documents a range of interactional moments wherein experiences are invoked and negotiated over the course of reporting racism in the interviews. The findings align with the existing discursive-psychological and conversation-analytic research on experiences, and provide further evidence on how speakers jointly orient to and manage the issues of who knows and owns an experience, and has the premier authority to claim an experience, in relation to reporting racism. The analysis unveils the intricacy of inquiring and talking about a victim's experience of racism. People's (use of) common sense understanding of the detrimental nature of racism is met and complicated by an orientation to our unlevelled access to an experience of racism, which is a category-based societal problem.

'One size doesn't fit all': Lessons from interaction analysis on tailoring Open Science practices to qualitative research.

The Open Science Movement aims to enhance the soundness, transparency, and accessibility of scientific research, and at the same time increase public trust in science. Currently, Open Science practices are mainly presented as solutions to the 'reproducibility crisis' in hypothetico-deductive quantitative research. Increasing interest has been shown towards exploring how these practices can be adopted by qualitative researchers. In reviewing this emerging body of work, we conclude that the issue of diversity within qualitative research has not been adequately addressed. Furthermore, we find that many of these endeavours start with existing solutions for which they are trying to find matching problems to be solved. We contrast this approach with a natural incorporation of Open Science practices within interaction analysis and its constituent research traditions: conversation analysis, discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, and membership categorisation analysis. Zooming in on the development of conversation analysis starting in the 1960s, we highlight how practices for opening up and sharing data and analytic thinking have been embedded into its methodology. On the basis of this presentation, we propose a series of lessons learned for adopting Open Science practices in qualitative research.

Interpretative repertoires of long-term weight management: negotiating accountability and explaining success.

OBJECTIVE: Public health messages encourage maintaining a stable weight and are influential in shaping normative weight management discourses. We studied how individuals with different weight maintenance histories constructed relations to these discourses in their sense-making on weight management. DESIGN: Our study used critical discursive psychology (CDP) as a theoretical and methodological framework for examining the accounts of 20 lifelong weight maintainers and 20 weight-loss maintainers (altogether 17 men and 23 women, aged 51-74). RESULTS: We identified three interpretative repertoires the participants used for making sense of weight management. The lifelong weight maintainers and weight-loss maintainers differed in their ways of using three repertoires. The "everyday challenges" repertoire that emphasized external obstacles was most emphatic in weight-loss maintainers' accounts of unsuccessful weight management, and the "following instructions" repertoire that highlighted control and disciplined behavior in their accounts of success. The "lifestyle and personalized routines" repertoire that stressed customized needs and routinization of practices was most prominent in lifelong weight maintainers' accounts of successful weight management. CONCLUSION: Our findings stress the importance of alternative ways of talking about and supporting weight management to prevent stigmatization. In conclusion, we suggest employing morally neutral language by focusing on lifestyle and wellbeing instead of weight.

'Is it in your basic personality?' Negotiations about traits and context in diagnostic interviews for personality disorders.

What does it mean to claim that somebody's personality is disordered? The aim in this paper is to examine how the process of diagnosing personality disorders (PD) unfolds on a practical level. We take an in-depth look at PD interviews, paying close attention to the occasional discrepancies in the clinicians' and the patients' approaches to generalising the behaviour of patients to describe their personality. Clinicians are guided by the medical model and structured interviews in their approach. We regard the interview situation as interplay between the institution, the clinician and the patient - and the final diagnosis as an interactional construction between them. Our data consists of video-recorded interviews in Finland with 10 adult patients and three psychiatric nurses. The collection was compiled from 22 excerpts in which the participants orient differently to the generalisability of personality traits. Our observations show that, in these interviews, patients frequently make sense of their behaviour differently from what is expected - not as a reflection of their personality traits, but as an outcome of many situational factors. Our understanding leads us to emphasise the importance of making visible the practices that shape the diagnostic process in psychiatry.

'You truly are the worst kind of racist!': Argumentation and polarization in online discussions around gender and radical-right populism.

The role of women in populist and radical right-wing parties is a topic that has gained increased scholarly attention. The aim of this article is to add to this literature by analysing how a female right-wing populist leader becomes positioned in online interactions in the hybrid media system. In doing so, the study seeks to make a twofold contribution to research on populist and radical right discourse online: to explore the ways in which notions related to gender and radical-right populism are constructed in such discourse and to shed light on their argumentative character. The study applies a critical discursive psychological approach to study these discursive patterns in two interrelated social media datasets, comprising discussion threads from Facebook and Twitter. The study shows how, through argumentation and dialogue, the commenters' position both each other and the female populist leader as fit or unfit, racist or non-racist, patriotic or non-patriotic and as a victim or culprit of hate-speech and misogyny. The implications of these findings for social psychological research on radical-right populism, political polarization and online hate-speech are discussed.

Who is expected to make contact? Interpretative repertoires related to an intergroup encounter between Finnish majority mothers and immigrant mothers.

Although the benefits of contact for positive intergroup relations are widely acknowledged, less is known about how group members construct the agency and responsibility of contact participants in intergroup encounters. Using critical discursive psychology, we analysed the interpretative repertoires that Finnish majority mothers (N = 13) and mothers with an immigrant background (N = 10) used when talking about a hypothetical intergroup encounter among Finnish and immigrant mothers in a 'family café' (a group for mothers and children). Our analysis identified five interpretative repertoires that differed in terms of the levels of categorization used (individual, group, motherhood) and how agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the parties in the intergroup encounter. Overall, constructing someone as agentic did not automatically result in their being portrayed as more responsible for making contact. Respondents described contact to occur with only two repertoires, in which both agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the same party. This highlights the need to consider both agency and sense of responsibility as possible factors preceding intergroup contact.

Offensive, hateful comment: A networked discourse practice of blame and petition for justice during COVID-19 on Chinese Weibo.

Using data from user comments to the official social networking account of the Hubei Red Cross Foundation on a participatory web platform, this study attends to the offensive and hateful comments produced by ordinary Internet users to blame the elite authorities for their malfeasance in managing the donation during the COVID-19 in China. Drawing on Discursive Psychology, we focus on the rhetorical strategies that users employ to legitimise their actions as well-founded evidential blame against a norm-breaking act rather than radical extremist speech. The associated hatred among discussants are moral, social judgements. That said, hate speech also helps construct the moral standards of a normalised society.

Organizational logics in time of crises: How physicians narrate the healthcare response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Swedish hospitals.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare organizations and puts focus on risk management in many ways. Both medical staff and leaders at various levels have been forced to find solutions to problems they had not previously encountered. This study aimed to explore how physicians in Sweden narrated the changes in organizational logic in response to the Covid-19 pandemic using neo-institutional theory and discursive psychology. In specific, we aimed to explore how physicians articulated their understanding of if and, in that case, how the organizational logic has changed during this crisis response. METHODS: The empirical material stems from interviews with 29 physicians in Sweden in the summer and autumn of 2020. They were asked to reflect on the organizational response to the pandemic focusing on leadership, support, working conditions, and patient care. RESULTS: The analysis revealed that the organizational logic in Swedish healthcare changed and that the physicians came in troubled positions as leaders. With management, workload, and risk repertoires, the physicians expressed that the organizational logic, to a large extent, was changed based on local contextual circumstances in the 21 self-governing regions. The organizational logic was being altered based upon how the two powerbases (physicians and managers) were interacting over time. CONCLUSIONS: Given that healthcare probably will deal with future unforeseen crises, it seems essential that healthcare leaders discuss what can be a sustainable organizational logic. There should be more explicit regulatory elements about who is responsible for what in similar situations. The normative elements have probably been stretched during the ongoing crisis, given that physicians have gained practical experience and that there is now also, at least some evidence-based knowledge about this particular pandemic. But the question is what knowledge they need in their education when it comes to dealing with new unknown risks.

Dehumanization through humour and conspiracies in online hate towards Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been widespread conversations about the origins of the virus and who to blame for it. This article focuses on the online hate directed at Chinese and Asian people during the pandemic. Taking a critical discursive psychological approach, we analysed seven online threads related to COVID-19 and China from two Finnish websites (Suomi24 and Ylilauta) and one US (8kun) site. We identified three discursive trends associated with dehumanising Chinese populations: 'monstrous Chinese', 'immoral Chinese' and 'China as a threat', which created different forms of dehumanisation on a continuum from harsher dehumanisation to milder depersonalisation. The animalistic metaphors, coarse language, humorous frames and conspiracy beliefs worked to rhetorically justify the dehumanisation of Chinese individuals, making it more acceptable to portray them as a homogeneous and inhumane mass of people that deserves to be attacked. This study contributes to the field of discursive research on dehumanisation by deepening our knowledge of the specific features of Sinophobic hate speech.

'It's more than sadness': The Discursive Construction of Depression on Australian Depression Websites.

Depression has been the subject of increased awareness and concern in Australia, but there has been little research into how depression is constructed on mental health websites, which have become a major resource for mental health information among the general public. In this study, critical discursive psychology was employed to analyse the informational content of eight major Australian mental health websites concerning depression. Four interpretative repertoires were identified - a biomedical, a self-optimization, a normal-natural and a societal-structural repertoire. The biomedical and self-optimization repertoires were the most prevalent, constructing depression as an illness within an individual occurring as a result of a biological or psychological deficit. Whilst previous studies have identified the predominance of a biomedical repertoire of depression on official websites, this study highlights the growing prominence of a self-optimization repertoire alongside the biomedical. Whilst it appeared that the aim of the websites was to challenge stigma and encourage help-seeking, it is argued that this way of understanding depression may have counter-productive effects in that the problem is located within the individual rather than with society, and individuals may be positioned as responsible for managing their own mental health, under the guidance of experts. The implications of understanding depression in this way, and not in alternative ways, are discussed.