There wasn't a chance to just 'be': An Existential Interpretative Phenomenological exploration of Identity and distress with members of British South Asian communities

British-South-Asian mental health research in recognising its uncritical medicalisation, and colonially derived homogenisation of the communities it works with, has undergone a turn towards the experiential. However, this turn is incomplete, offering an atomised and continually wider and less person-centred volume of knowledge, rather than deeper understanding, as the mental health outcomes for these communities stagnate. To explore how British South Asian individuals make sense of their mental health experiences, this research employs a novel methodology combining insights from decolonial theory, existential psychology, and interpretative phenomenological tradition, to propose and utilise a novel method of Existential IPA (EIPA) to overcome these limitations. Following ethical approval granted by Manchester Metropolitan University,  data was constructed through semi-longitudinal use of adapted free narrative association sessions and co-analysis of the findings, to enable an EIPA which radically prioritises lived experience performing cross case analysis through existential systematisation to provide a way forward in exploring lived experience in British South Asian communities. The results demonstrate the inappropriateness of universalised moral ecologies in research and mental health practise; the insufficiency of treating anxiety as meaningful generalisable emotions and its reality as ruptured meaning making; how existential systematisation can be shared with unique qualia; how shame in this context is an ontological injury; how bio-medical NHS epistemologies are incompatible with narrators lifeworlds; and how disruption to self-concept often mischarecterised as cognitive is embodied, relational, cultural, and existentially situated. This project proposes that what is required is a radical re-examination of how we make knowledge in this area and describes one process and outcome for doing so.