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ItemHeartscapes: A new narrative for understanding the complex interplay of mental illness and cardiovascular health( 2021)People who live with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder are vulnerable to premature mortality. The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. Extensive research has produced important biomedical knowledge of this complex health problem. However, this knowledge has not translated into improvements in the cardiovascular health of people who live with mental illness. This PhD research project explored this real-world health problem through the stories and medical records of ten people living with mental illness. The research aimed to gain understanding of how living with mental illness influences cardiovascular health in everyday life. This study used critical realism and a realist qualitative design to frame a multi-method narrative inquiry. Data collection included clinical file reviews, semi-structured interviews, and narrative interviews. Visual methods were used to elicit experience and meaning making. Narrative analysis across the datasets produced a collection of ten illustrated core stories. Thematic analysis conducted within and across stories generated a metanarrative. In the metanarrative, a landscape metaphor was employed to explore how ten people who live with mental illness experienced and made meaning of their cardiovascular health in their everyday life. The metanarrative offers collective understandings of lived cardiovascular health. There are four key storylines: 1) Borderlands: Getting mental illness, switching on the complex interplay; 2) Entangled Lands: Living the complex interplay; 3) Heart Space: Uncovering the human hearts; and 4) Transformational Lands: Transforming vulnerable hearts. This approach generated a new narrative for understanding the complex relationship between mental illness and cardiovascular health. The new narrative affirms mental illness to be a powerful contributor to a complex array of interconnected cardiovascular risks. By shifting the critical realist explanatory lens from stories of illness to stories of transformation, this new narrative points to multidimensional connectedness as a fundamental precursor to whole heart health. Addressing the cardiovascular inequalities experienced by people who live with mental illness calls for whole of system transformation and the advancement of radical multileveled relational approaches to improving heart health.