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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.

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient "personal story" within mental health organizations. 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.

Abstract
Participatory research, or the practice of involving 'peers' with lived experience, has become popular in social work. Peer engagement is lauded for: 'democratising' the research process; providing 'capacity building' and facilitating opportunities to co-produce knowledge. Yet, these claims are rarely evaluated by empirical investigations into the socio-material work conditions of peer researchers. Here we present findings of a study that examined the experiences of peer researchers, focusing on payment inequities and social workers' roles in advocating for economic justice. Together with peer research assistants, we conducted a participatory constructivist grounded theory study, interviewing peers (total n = 34) who were compensated to work on studies focused on the following: racialised communities, communities of people who use drugs, consumer/psychiatric survivor/ex-patient and mad communities and trans/non-binary communities. Our findings highlight divergent compensation practices in peer research work. Whilst some peers were satisfied with their treatment on research teams and payment received, others discussed challenges associated with precarious short-term casual work and managing formal income alongside state social assistance such as disability support. We conclude that in some cases, the peer role is characterised by precarious working conditions which compound rather than challenge injustice within the research enterprise, and we discuss implications for social work.

This qualitative study examined how homeless individuals with mental illness experience pathways into homelessness. Study participants were enrolled in the At Home/Chez Soi project, a Pan-Canadian Randomized Controlled Trial comparing the Housing First approach with Treatment as Usual for homeless individuals. This inquiry is grounded in social ecological perspective, which considers interactions between individual and structural factors. Findings from consumer narrative interviews ( n = 219) revealed that individual factors, such as substance abuse, relationship conflicts and mental health issues significantly contributed to homelessness, in addition to structural transitions from foster care and institutional settings into the community. Additional structural factors entrenched participants in unsafe communities, created obstacles to exiting homelessness and amplified individual risk factors. The study findings confirm the role of individual risk factors in pathways into homelessness, but underscore the need for policies and interventions to address structural factors that worsen individual risks and create barriers to exiting homelessness.

Mental health lived experience narratives are first-person accounts of people with experience of mental health problems. They have been published in journals, books and online, and used in healthcare interventions and anti-stigma campaigns. There are concerns about their potential misuse. A four-language systematic review was conducted of published literature characterizing uses and misuses of mental health lived experience narratives within healthcare and community settings. 6531 documents in four languages (English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) were screened and 78 documents from 11 countries were included. Twenty-seven uses were identified in five categories: political, societal, community, service level and individual. Eleven misuses were found, categorized as relating to the narrative (narratives may be co-opted, narratives may be used against the author, narratives may be used for different purpose than authorial intent, narratives may be reinterpreted by others, narratives may become patient porn, narratives may lack diversity), relating to the narrator (narrator may be subject to unethical editing practises, narrator may be subject to coercion, narrator may be harmed) and relating to the audience (audience may be triggered, audience may misunderstand). Four open questions were identified: does including a researcher's personal mental health narrative reduce the credibility of their research?: should the confidentiality of narrators be protected?; who should profit from narratives?; how reliable are narratives as evidence?).