Your story, your mental health: The roles of narrative in wellbeing, resilience, and identity

Brendan Stone@storyingshef

www.storyingsheffield.com @storyingshef

The focus of Storying Sheffield is learning about, and then producing, representations and stories about everyday life, and lives, in Sheffield, with an emphasis on identity, place, and history.

• Older people• People with dementia• School children • People with disabilities and/or mental health problems• New migrants to the UK• Patients in secure hospitals• Neighbourhood/ community storytelling• NHS Trusts

• Everyday life• Knowledge• Small things• Connections• Collaboration• Ways of telling

Brendan Stone

Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

Ross David Burke, The Truth Effect, published as When the Music’s Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia, pp. 217-8

Galloway, The Trick …, pp. 174-5

To know "who" a person is it will be necessary to have some appreciation of the story in which the person understands him- or herself to be a protagonist.

Juan Galis-Menendez, ‘Paul Ricoeur on Narrative and Personal Identity’

“I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substantiality, impervious to evolution.”

“The fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction is the assignment to an individual or a community of a specific identity that we can call their narrative identity.”

“The subject then appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life... As the literary analysis of autobiography confirms, the story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told.”

Caroline Pearce, 'World Interrupted: An Autoethnographic Exploration into the Rupture of Self and Family Narratives Following the Onset of Chronic Illness and the Death of a Mother,' Qualitative Sociology Review, Volume IV, Issue 1 – April 2008

stories

“The exercise of power creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information […] The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely,

knowledge constantly induces effects of power.” Michel Foucault, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977

Stories of

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“Our narratives of ourselves are always incomplete, because our existence is psychologically, linguistically, discursively, physically, bound to and constructed by the other/Other. Indeed this understanding is key to what it is to be human and to live an ethical existence. Literary poetic speech is defined in part by its openness to multiple interpretations and its resistance to closure. As such it leaves room for the experience of alterity to haunt its margins.”

• Everyday life• Knowledge• Small things• Connections• Collaboration• Ways of telling