| Abstract |
Creativity-based approaches are widely used for mental health in therapy, community support, and advocacy. Within these settings, media created by people with lived experience of mental illness, including participatory film, can be beneficial both for those who create them, as means for self-expression, and for audiences who receive them, as means of challenging stereotypes of mental illness. My PhD research explored how interactive media can support the creation of personal accounts of mental illness and recovery by those who have experienced it first hand. Interactive media can, in fact, afford higher levels of complexity and nuance in depiction of experiences than traditional videos by allowing multiple stories and perspectives to co-exist in a film (non-linear storytelling). My research showed that combining the power of video with the flexibility of interactive media opened a space for the viewpoints of participants to co-exist harmoniously, supporting effective self-expression and safe self-disclosure. This in turn encouraged audiences to empathically connect with the participants' experiences, in a context where compassion for oneself and empathy for others are the cornerstones of overcoming internalised stigma and challenging external stigma about mental illness. This research is highly interdisciplinary, combining participatory design of interactive media, practised within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), with community media production and mental health practice. As often happens with highly interdisciplinary PhD work, it can be difficult to fully account for the different facets of a project within the duration of a PhD programme. In particular, this PhD research contains an untapped wealth of findings relevant to mental health and social sciences, that have so far been subordinated to the HCI findings in publications and conferences. The ESRC post-doctoral fellowship is an ideal opportunity to consolidate the PhD research in the field of mental health and social sciences, while supporting my long-term career plan of developing an academic profile in applied research at the intersection of mental health participatory research and video-based storytelling. The fellowship will build on the findings emerged from the PhD research by conducting dissemination and impact work with a variety of academic and non-academic audiences and it will lay the foundation of future research work through a tailored programme of training and the preparation of a new funding application. In terms of consolidation work, during the fellowship I will disseminate research findings through leading academic journals in mental health and social sciences; present the work at mental health conferences; compile a guide on co-writing papers with research participants, a practice of growing relevance in participatory research across social sciences; run dissemination workshops and create a toolkit of methods for public sector and third-sector stakeholders; and share Stepping Through Interactive, the film created by my PhD research participants, to a variety of public and specialist audiences, in full support of participants' self-expressive and advocacy agenda. In terms of creating the foundation for new research work, I will undertake training to enrich my existing experience in practice-based qualitative methods with expertise in mental health research methods; I will work with my mentors on a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award application to use the storytelling techniques developed in my PhD in supporting the adaptation of Behavioural Activation, first line treatment for depression in the UK, to diverse cultural contexts. The programme of work proposed is thematically well-aligned with two key DTP pathways: Wellbeing, Health, and Communities and Data, Communication and New Technologies. |
