Storytelling:An Act of Resistance or a Commodity? (original) (raw)
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Peer Reviewed Storytelling: An Act of Resistance or a Commodity
Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, 2019
Telling our own stories of our experiences of distress and madness, of oppression and treatment, of survival and resistance, is a source of power for people who use or are forced to use mental health services. Storytelling has created a space for people, whose voices have been traditionally silenced, to be heard, affirmed, and to organise into collective action. However, recent trends suggest that these stories are becoming a commodity with mental health organisations and educational institutions using them primarily to promote their own agendas. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to disempower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. (Adichie, 2009) We three women are activists (survivors, researchers, and educators) and, drawing from our experiences in the Scottish and Irish contexts, we discuss the need to constantly problematise what has been achieved through the user movement. We are frustrated because people who share their stories remain disadvantaged, often unpaid, unequal partners while organisations, professionals, and academics benefit through receiving funding and building a career path on the basis of user involvement. While this is an unsettling position, we believe that we can make the best of it by being critical rather than cynical, by staying hopeful and engaged with the constantly changing demands of activism.
Recovering our Stories: A small act of resistance
Studies in Social Justice , 2012
This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient "personal story." The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having "lived experience" has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from "agents of change" towards one of "disability tourism" or "patient porn." We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change.
Working with Dignity and Respect: Improving Mental Health Services with Digital Stories
2018
This chapter describes one of the longest-running Patient Voices digital storytelling projects and a long-standing collaboration between an NHS organisation delivering mental health care for people living in Bolton, the city of Manchester, Salford and Trafford and a wide range of specialist mental health and substance misuse services across Greater Manchester, a university, and Patient Voices. Cahoon, Haigh and Sumner describe how Greater Manchester Mental NHS Foundation Trust has been working with Patient Voices to help mental health service users and their carers create digital stories of their experiences of care. The stories have been used in induction, education and training, to influence discussions and decisions at Board level, to support clinical transformation, to raise awareness of mental health issues in the community, to understand quality from the perspective of the service user and to recruit new staff who share the organisation’s values. The authors describe the proje...
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies , 2019
This paper explores the politics of resilience and recovery narratives by bringing critical ethnography and auto-ethnographic methods to bear on my own experiences with storytelling distress in different contexts. Inviting people with lived experience to share their stories is now common practice in education, mental health, and broader community venues. Yet even when the intent of the stories shared are to offer systemic critique of mental health epistemes, it is difficult to hear such stories beyond the psychiatric gaze. I argue that individual storytelling practices now get processed through resiliency and recovery metanarratives that continue to position both the problem and its potential solution at the level of individual bodies. By offering an account of my own experiences of storytelling, I explore the limits, risks, and productive functions of this practice. This includes how such narratives, in accumulation, can reify conceptions of the resilient and recovered subject and thus help solidify mental health truth regimes.
Psychiatric Survivors and Narratives of Activism
2013
Despite there being a substantial history of survivors challenging psychiatry, there has been little attention paid to the lives of these individuals. The literature has primarily focussed upon 'recovery' and the development of typologies of emotional distress. Whilst the focus upon people's individual experience is to be welcomed, the literature has tended to background the causes to which survivors have committed part of their lives. The aim of this study was to explore the 'journeys' of survivors into activism to challenge psychiatry. The project drew upon a social constructionist epistemology and narrative theory. Nine interviews were conducted with survivors with a history of involvement in activism. A dialogic/performative analysis was used to explore issues of identity construction amongst the participants. The analysis is presented as 'case studies' in order to try to capture the complexity of each person's narrative. The discussion section then brings each of these narratives together. It is argued that the participants' narratives shared common characteristics and reflected the narratives of the collective of which participants were a part, the wider survivor movement as well as dominant societal narratives. However, the way in which participants drew upon these narratives differed both within and across the accounts. Variations were apparent regarding the ways in which participants' narratives contested psychiatry. A personal and moral construction of activism featured heavily, with participants positioning themselves as both individuals with experience of the psychiatric system and as citizens. This project highlights the need for understandings which take into account the complexity of people's lives, and their wider collective and social context. Recommendations include raising awareness about survivor groups/networks without co-opting their practices. Furthermore, this study attests to the need to take up issues of power and inequality, and their impact on people's lives, in research and clinical practice. 189). This broad definition was deliberately chosen to leave open the means by which people may be attempting to challenge psychiatry. Importantly, the term 'activist' will not be drawn upon. Firstly, in accord with the social constructionist epistemology, this is to avoid simplistic essentialist constructions of people's identities. Secondly, although the term 'activist' is in growing circulation within the survivor literature in the UK (e.g. Campbell, 2008; Wallcraft, 2009), it is not assumed that all individuals will identify with this term and, as such, adopting it might foreclose the ways in which people might understand themselves in relation to their activities. Thirdly, in light of the topic of this research, 'psychiatric system' will be used instead of 'mental health system' and, also, 'distress' will be adopted instead of 'mental distress', 'mental disorder' or 'mental illness', given that the latter terms include assumptions about the 'location' of distress (i.e. the 'mind') and have pathologising connotations (Cromby, 2013; Mental Health Foundation, 2013). In addition, it is important to note that 'psychiatry' refers to the paradigm, or 'narrative', of psychiatry, which is expanded upon below, rather than to individual psychiatrists who work within this paradigm. Lastly, I will also use the first-person to emphasise my active role in the storying of this research at all stages (c.f. Holloway & Wheeler, 2010). Literature Search Strategy A literature review was conducted over a period of 20 months. The full details of this are given in Appendix 1. In summary, an electronic search of key terms was conducted (e.g. 'survivor', 'activism', 'narrative' and 'social movements'), which reflected the interests of this project. The databases searched included Ingenta, PsychINFO, Pubmed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. In addition, references and citations within relevant articles were followed up, as were articles and books recommended by my peers and supervisor.
Narrative and mental health: preserving the emancipatory tradition
Narrative approaches have exercised an emancipatory influence within mental health. In this article, it is suggested that there is a risk that the emancipatory tradition associated with narrative may be co-opted through contemporary mental health strategy by a narrow agenda which promotes a particular Western and neoliberal form of citizenship. This may limit the way recovery can be imagined by equating it solely with the future orientated individual who strives, above all, to be economically independent. To resist this, it is suggested that narrative in mental health should be approached with recourse to therapeutic thinking which promotes a relational ethos of ‘recovery together’. The ‘recovery together’ model is subsequently considered in relation to narrative research on temporal understandings which have been conducted in disability studies and in the area of chronic illness. These studies point towards the value of a relational orientation towards well-being in the present, rather than fixating on future goals. It is suggested that a relational philosophy of the present might be usefully incorporated into narrative approaches when working therapeutically with people suffering from mental distress. It is argued that this might enable users and practitioners to extend the available narrative templates and to imagine recovery in diverse ways which support personal transformation and, ultimately, contribute to social change.
Unpacking stored and storied knowledge: Elicited biographies of activism in mental health
Health & Place, 2011
In this paper we consider the potential of autobiographical narratives for accessing 'storied knowledge' in research around geographies of health voluntarism. We firstly consider what is meant by elicited autobiography and how the narrative approach has been used in research more broadly. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Manchester, UK and Auckland, New Zealand we then demonstrate how this approach has helped us to map out and unpack the career journeys of mental health activists working within and across the voluntary and statutory sectors. Through our autobiographical narratives we illustrate how this approach has enabled us to elicit important insights into the triggers and trajectories underpinning mental health activism and how events and moments in time have provided critical junctures in these trajectories. We consider places as sites of significance in activist career paths; and as central to the researcher-participant gestalt within which the autobiography is elicited and recounted. The autobiographical process, we suggest, offers reflective insights into mental health activism that might not otherwise be gained using more conventional methodologies.
Patient' voices, social movements and the habitus; how psychiatric survivors 'speak out
Social science & medicine (1982), 2001
What is the 'voice' of the mental health 'user'? This paper seeks to address this question through the presentation of a detailed comparative analysis of two anthologies written by people living with mental 'illness' in the 1950s and 1990s. Using a narrative-style qualitative analysis, the structure and content of the two anthologies is explored. The analysis illustrates the way in which the 'voice' of the mental patient in the 1950s was very different to that of today. The paper then aims to provide a theoretical explanation that accounts for this transformation of voice. Appropriating theoretical concepts from phenomenology and sociology, in particular, Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus', the paper explores the way in which the 'personal' voice of the mental patient is formulated in dialogical relation to wider public and collective movements. These, in turn, connect to broader transformations in the social, economic and health '...
Narrative as Evidence; accepting and interpreting the writing of a mental health service user
This report uses the framework of 'discourse analysis' to interpret and compare an example of a mental health service user's autobiographical writing with two accounts from users of other health care services. These personal stories are in turn contrasted with an extract from an interactional piece of writing and an extract from a conversation, to illustrate the limitations of the single-authored retrospective account. I assert that, as a mental health service user and a postgraduate student of mental health, I gain the benefit of being an 'insider' when judging whether interpretation or simple acceptance of an account is appropriate. However a caveat is introduced by considering Goffman's conception of 'role distance'. I argue that using a user's narrative alone is inadequate as evidence with which to judge 'outcomes'; that all knowledge has been acquired and negotiated through encounters with others, however remotely, and that the roles taken, and results achieved, are always to varying degrees prescribed by others.