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Social relations benefit health but are challenging for people with persistent mental illness. Carrying out activities with other people facilitates social relations. What is less clear, however, is how social relations are established in everyday activities. The aim of this exploratory study is to gain an understanding of how social relations emerge in everyday activities among people with persistent mental illness. The study was inspired by ethnography and used participant observation to gather data in the context of a psychiatric centre. The participants were inpatients with persistent mental illness. By using interpretative analysis with a focus on narratives we identified one core finding as 'daily routines as a facilitator for social relations', along with narratives that illustrate dimensions of the core finding. These were 'caring', 'belonging' and 'memory-sharing'. The study highlights how the context with its focus on everyday routines creates social opportunities that facilitate the emergence of social relations.

With a focus on enacted narratives, this ethnographic study addresses how people with mental illness communicate returning home after a treatment stay at a psychiatric centre. Data were analysed based on Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and action. Our analysis consisted of three analytic layers: the significant issue of discharge, identifying three stories of how being on the way home is enacted, and a further interpretation and discussion. The narrative analysis shows how significant issues of returning home are enacted among persons in everyday activities at one centre, and how an inherent ambiguity raised some challenges within the field of mental health. This study shows how conducting everyday activities enable people use the available narrative resources to negotiate the self; hence they reflect and create thoughts about the return home that are shared among persons at the centre.

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