Majse Lind: ‘Narrative identity and mental illness in young individuals’

The Laureate’s lecture was held as part of the Nils Klim Symposium, and is followed by presentations by three other speakers, a panel discussion and a Q&A session.

In her lecture, Lind links the storied sense of self, the narrative identity, to the development, severity, and recovery of personality pathology. A recording from the symposium and the manuscript for Linds lecture can be accessed below in full.

Narrative identity and mental illness in young individuals

by Majse Lind

“My body is empty. Contentless. I am just walking around. Numb. Outside of time. I just happen.”

This is a striking quote from a young woman suffering from personality disorder – a severe mental illness characterized by enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, relating to oneself and others, and behaving that are inflexible and maladaptive, often leading to significant distress, impaired functioning, self-harm, and elevated risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (e.g., Tyrer et al., 2015).

 Sadly, her experience is not an isolated one. Rather, it reflects an alarming global trend.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, around 20% of people in high-income countries are living with a mental disorder in a given year. Nearly half of people in these countries will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives (OECD, 2026a). Among children and adolescents, approximately one in five struggles with a mental health condition (OECD, 2026b). Particularly concerning is the sharp rise in health problems among young people — especially young women like the one behind the opening quote. So, I think its is fair to conclude that mental health problems affect, to some extent, all of us.

Mental health problems can, and should, be understood from many different perspectives. In my own work as a psychologist, I have focused particularly on the role of personality and identity.

To understand the relationship between personality and mental health, I have been deeply inspired by, among others, the work of Dan P. McAdams, who posed the deceptively simple yet profound question: What do we know when we know a person? (McAdams, 1995).

McAdams argues that personality can be understood across three interconnected layers: traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity. Together, these layers help explain both what people are generally like and what makes each person uniquely human.

The first layer consists of personality traits — characteristics such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or neuroticism. Traits represent the most stable and general aspects of personality. They describe broad tendencies in how people typically think, feel, and behave across situations and over time. Traits answer questions such as: Is this person generally outgoing or reserved? Emotionally stable or anxious? Organized or impulsive?

In McAdams’ framework, traits represent the “having” side of personality — the relatively enduring dispositions a person has. Traits are enormously important because they help us understand consistent differences between people and predict outcomes related to relationships, work life, health, and well-being.

But traits alone cannot fully capture a human life. Two people may both be highly extroverted, for example, while pursuing entirely different futures and understanding themselves in profoundly different ways.

This brings us to the second layer: goals, motives, values, and personal strivings — what McAdams calls characteristic adaptations. These represent the “doing” side of personality because they capture what people are actively trying to pursue, avoid, accomplish, or become.

This layer asks questions such as: What does this person care about? What are they striving toward? What kind of relationships, future, or life do they want?

Goals give direction and meaning to behavior. One person may strive for intimacy and belonging, another for achievement, autonomy, or creative expression. Unlike traits, goals are more flexible and responsive to life circumstances, developmental changes, and cultural expectations. Adolescence and young adulthood are especially important periods because individuals are actively negotiating educational paths, relationships, identities, and future aspirations.

While traits describe who a person generally is, goals describe how people actively engage with the world and shape their lives through intentional action.

The third layer — and the layer closest to my own work — is narrative identity. Narrative identity refers to the internalized and evolving life story that people construct to make sense of themselves across time. It represents the “author” side of personality because it concerns how individuals interpret their experiences and weave them into a coherent story about who they are, how they became that person, and where their life is going.

Humans are fundamentally storytelling creatures, and it is through storytelling that people make sense of themselves and their lives. Beginning particularly in adolescence and continuing throughout adulthood, narrative identity serves a binding function in personality. It weaves together traits, goals, personal experiences, and imagined futures into a story that provides life with a sense of unity, continuity, purpose, and meaning.

This layer addresses deeply existential questions: Who am I? How did my life become what it is? How and why have I changed over time? What kind of future am I moving toward?

Importantly, no two life stories are identical. In this sense, narrative identity represents perhaps the deepest and most uniquely human layer of personality.

Narrative identity research occupies a fascinating space between the deeply personal — the idiosyncratic level of human experience — and the scientifically generalizable, or nomothetic, level. On the one hand, every life story is unique. On the other hand, researchers have identified themes that recur across stories and cultures such as themes of agency and communion. These overarching themes have been considered basic human needs for getting ahead and getting along. Using established coding systems, we can systematically study these themes while still respecting the individuality of each person’s story through both qualitative and quantitative lenses.

In my own work, I have developed coding manuals capturing the more fragmented narrative identity (e.g., Lind et al., 2022). I have also developed a narrative identity self-evaluation measure called the NISE scale, which my colleagues and I argue taps into narrative identity through items such as: “Thinking about my life story helps me know who I am as a person” or “My life story feels like a puzzle and the pieces do not fit together.” (Lind et al., 2025).

Within the field, there is an ongoing discussion about whether narrative identity primarily resides in the story itself and should therefore be assessed by trained coders that use well-established coding manuals to code and quantify the stories, or whether it belongs to the subjective experience of the person telling the story. Importantly, these different methodologies coexist and often relate to many of the same outcomes, including subjective well-being, personality functioning, and broader psychopathology (Dunlop, 2021).

More recently, researchers around the world, including myself, have begun examining whether artificial intelligence can be used to code life stories. Interestingly, while personality traits already appear relatively easy for AI to assess (e.g., Wright et al., 2026), narrative identity remains far more difficult for AI to truly grasp. AI can often detect simpler narrative characteristics, such as emotional tone or valence, but it still struggles with the deeper meaning-making aspects of human storytelling. In this sense, narrative identity may represent one of the most uniquely human layers of personality — at least for now.

But what happens when the story begins to go awry? What happens when a person no longer experiences themselves as coherent, continuous, or meaningful?

As the opening quote painfully illustrates, individuals with personality disorder often struggle profoundly with identity and with their temporal sense of self. The young woman describes feeling “outside of time” — disconnected from continuity, direction, and coherence. She does not experience herself as moving through life. She simply “happens.”

This is an extremely painful way of existing.

My own research shows that individuals with personality disorder tend to construct life stories that are more fragmented and incoherent. They often struggle when envisioning the future. They perceive themselves and close others as people who have experienced many negative events and who, as a result, have changed for the worse. Within these stories, protagonists are frequently portrayed as passive, powerless, and subject to external forces rather than capable of shaping their own lives. Thus, themes of agency are often low, while meaningful interpersonal connection and belongingness, themes of communion, are limited or absent (Lind et al., 2020).

When reasoning about others — for example when constructing stories about parents or close relationships, labelled vicarious stories, — individuals with personality disorder demonstrate less nuanced meaning-making and greater self–other confusion compared to control participants (Lind et al., 2020). Taken together, narrative identity research paints a compelling picture of the storied sense of self in personality disorder as fragmented, defective, confused, emotionally isolated, and lacking agency.

Importantly, people with personality disorder may indeed have lived more troubled lives. But equally important is how these experiences become interpreted and integrated into identity. The stories people construct about themselves become identity-salient. They shape how individuals perceive themselves, others, and the possibilities available to them.

The stories we construct about ourselves shape how we perceive the world — and what possibilities for action we believe are available to us. If a young person repeatedly comes to understand themselves as powerless, disconnected, or fundamentally flawed, this does not merely influence how they feel. It also constrains what futures they can imagine for themselves.

My work suggests that these maladaptive ways of constructing narrative identity begin emerging already in adolescents as young as 12 years old in inpatient settings (Lind et al., 2019a). This is particularly concerning because adolescence is precisely the developmental period in which narrative identity is beginning to consolidate. If the story about the self becomes organized around fragmentation, hopelessness, alienation, and low agency early in life, it may place already vulnerable adolescents on a continuing vulnerable trajectory.

At the same time, adolescence represents a unique window for change. Because narrative identity is still developing, alternative and more adaptive stories about the self may be easier to scaffold before they become more consolidated across adulthood. My work has shown that themes of agency can increase during both individual and group psychotherapy among adolescents and adults with personality pathology (Lind et al., 2019b; Lind et al., 2023). Agency may therefore represent a particularly crucial element in recovery — the gradual movement from experiencing oneself as passive and powerless toward experiencing oneself as an active author of one’s own life.

A person’s narrative identity does not develop in isolation. It evolves within a broader narrative ecology consisting of family, peers, culture, society, social media, and increasingly also technology such as AI (Lind, 2023; Frederiksen et al., 2026). The stories people hear about themselves and others profoundly shape how they come to understand who they are and what kinds of lives are possible for them.

My work has shown that individuals with personality disorder often construct stories about parents and close others that resemble the narrative style of their own identities. This may partly reflect difficulties separating oneself psychologically from important attachment figures. But it may also reflect the powerful influence of the narrative environments in which people grow up (Lind, 2023).

This also helps explain why change can be so difficult. Therapy may introduce alternative stories about the self. But for these stories to truly take hold, they often require witnesses — relationships and environments that help sustain and scaffold change. It is difficult to construct a new story about oneself if one immediately returns to the same narrative environment that continuously reinforces the old, dominating one.

For this reason, adolescence may represent a particularly important period for intervention, because families, schools, and treatment systems are often still actively involved in the young person’s life. This potentially creates greater opportunities for reshaping the broader narrative ecology surrounding the individual.

Finally, one aspect of the narrative ecology that we still do not discuss enough is the role of cultural master narratives surrounding mental illness itself. For example, a dominant societal narrative about borderline personality disorder is that individuals with the disorder are “difficult to treat.” These larger societal stories influence how people come to understand themselves and their possibilities for recovery. Such narratives can profoundly undermine agency, hope, and identity reconstruction (Lind, 2023).

We must critically examine the master narratives surrounding mental illness — how they are constructed, who gets to shape them, and how we may begin transforming those that are harmful, stigmatizing, or simply untrue.

To wrap up, narrative identity research is, in many ways, about “letting stories breathe,” as sociologist Arthur Frank so eloquently put it. Rather than focusing primarily on symptoms, diagnoses, or what a person is suffering from, narrative identity asks a different question: Who is the person who is suffering, and how do they make sense of their experiences and their life as a whole?

By attending to the stories people tell, we gain access to a phenomenologically rich, first-person perspective on human life. We begin to understand not only what has happened to a person, but what those experiences mean to them and how they are woven into an evolving sense of self. In this way, narrative identity reminds us that mental health is not only about reducing symptoms—it is also about understanding, and ultimately supporting, the person behind them.

References

Dunlop, W. (2021). Narrative identity’s nomological network: Expanding and organizing assessment of the storied self. Personality Science, 2(1), e6469.

Frederiksen, P., Van Berkel, N., & Lind, M. (2026). When artificial intelligence tells our stories: the role of AI in core functions of family storytelling in adolescence. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, 1872482.

Lind, M. (2023). Situating personality disorder within its maladaptive narrative identity ecology. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1117525

Lind, M., Adler, J. M., & Clark, L. A. (2020). Narrative identity and personality disorder: An empirical and conceptual review. Current psychiatry reports, 22(12), 67.

Lind, M., R. Cowan, H., Adler, J. M., & McAdams, D. P. (2025). Development and validation of the narrative identity self-evaluation scale (NISE). Journal of Personality assessment, 107(3), 292-305.

Lind, M., Kiel, L., Hansen, S. B., Jørgensen, M. S., & Simonsen, E. (2023). Narrative identity within mentalization-based group therapy for adolescents: a feasibility study. Children, 10(5), 854.

Lind, M., Jørgensen, C. R., Heinskou, T., Simonsen, S., Bøye, R., & Thomsen, D. K. (2019). Patients with borderline personality disorder show increased agency in life stories after 12 months of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 56(2), 274.

Lind, M., Vanwoerden, S., Bo, S., & Sharp, C. (2022). Borderline personality disorder in adolescence: The role of narrative identity in the intrapsychic reasoning system. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 13(5), 451.

Lind, M., Vanwoerden, S., Penner, F., & Sharp, C. (2019). Inpatient adolescents with borderline personality disorder features: Identity diffusion and narrative incoherence. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 10(4), 389.

McAdams, D. P. (1995). What do we know when we know a person?. Journal of personality, 63(3), 365-396.

OECD. (2026). The economic case for preventing mental ill health. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/16668f16-en

OECD. (2026). Child, adolescent and youth mental health in the 21st century. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/1092c3cb-en

Tyrer, P., Reed, G. M., & Crawford, M. J. (2015). Classification, assessment, prevalence, and effect of personality disorder. The Lancet, 385(9969), 717-726.

Wright, A. G., Ringwald, W. R., Vize, C. E., Eichstaedt, J. C., Angstadt, M., Taxali, A., & Sripada, C. (2026). Assessing personality using zero-shot generative AI scoring of brief open-ended text. Nature human behaviour, 10(3), 541-555.