A Sense of Something Else for Me: Search for Meaning in Life and Transcendence in Spouses of People with Mental Illness

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. In this article, I investigate search for meaning in life and transcendence in spouses of people with mental illness. Research related to the topic is scant. I interviewed 16 Finnish spouses and partners in narrative, semi-structured interviews, and analyzed the data narratively. The interviewees perceived mental illness as a threat to meaning. In the search for meaning, transcendence referred to hope, humor, wishing, and imagining. The search for meaning and transcendence were connected through the fragile "sense of something else for me"as detachment from the spouse's illness reality. Implications for pastoral theology can be found above all in Christian hope.