Everyone is a story

Health stories form part of our cultural landscape. We’ve all heard the tale of the Great Uncle who smoked 60 a day and lived to be 90 years old. It’s not always clear exactly whose uncle he was, but still, it's a great story! Families have these stories too, such as the time a relative absconded from hospital just before an operation, walking home in his dressing gown (this one is completely true, it was my Dad, but thankfully the operation was only a minor one!) There are mental health stories too and that's what my research is about.

We know that telling stories (narratives, in academic lingo) is an important way of making sense of the things that happen to us. They also tell us who we are. We are re-imagined in stories, a range of possible selves is within reach. Jerome Bruner said they’re often told when something important happens in or lives; it might be a danger or a challenge, or it might be something positive but we don’t tend to tell stories in which nothing happens. What’s interesting is that it’s not just a case of “stuff happens then we talk about it,” we actually use stories as a way to understand our experiences. So, in telling the story, we are also making sense of life events and ourselves. The plot will alter according to personal circumstances, mood, previous experiences and it will also be shaped by culture, family traditions and so on. A story can be told as a way to help us understand what’s happened, but each event could be 'storied' in a number of different ways. In this way, our experiences are something to be discovered, rather than concrete entities with one ‘official’ interpretation.   

My research work involves hearing people’s stories about their mental health. I’m no stranger to this; as a counsellor, I've listened to literally hundreds of life stories. At various times, I've been saddened, inspired, motivated, enlightened and entertained by what people had to say. I was already aware of the therapeutic value of story-telling and being heard and knew that the telling of a story could aid someone making sense of things. I acknowledged that the stories I was hearing might be rather different to the ones being told elsewhere in that person’s life; such was the privilege of doing therapeutic work. 

I also knew that often, someone would have pre-existing ‘stories’ in their mind, so their more recent experiences would take their place alongside the old. When someone has a number of pre-existing stories, they are liable to repeat old patterns because they make such intuitive sense; it’s just “how it is” for that person. As such, they can find themselves doing things that aren't always in their best interests. Part of the business of therapeutic work is to understand and possibly challenge these old stories by asking (in a variety of ways) "how’s this way of seeing your experiences working out?" And the response to these questions will vary, according to a person’s ability and willingness to introspect. It’s a difficult task to witness someone continuing with a pattern of behaviour that doesn’t exactly help them, but by asking the questions, the person is free to follow it up, if and when they want to. 

My research is, in a way, a continuation of this hearing people's stories. My task is to collect lots of stories (data) and put them together to create a kind of ‘collage’ of experiences. I'll then be providing some commentary, with a few psychoanalytic insights. It's more a mosaic than a collage, but my preferred way to describe it would be to say it's a bit like a kaleidoscope. A mosaic implies that the pattern is ‘fixed,’ whereas to me, human experience is anything but static. Just because we might think we see / think/ understand something now, it won’t necessarily look that way in a fortnight, or a couple of months' time. I want to reflect something of the dynamism of human lives in my work. Unfortunately I won;t be able to witness people's understanding evolve but I can take a snapshot of where they were at a given point in time and (hopefully) say something interesting about that. Just as it was when I did therapeutic work, it'll be such a privilege and I'm really looking forward to being part of it.