Centre For Medical Humanities

Publications

PCCS Book Series on Lived Experience of Mental Health

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Readers of the CMH blog may be interested in this press release from PCCS books and the Madness and Literature Network:

‘The ‘Our Encounters with…’ series collect together unmediated, unsanitised narratives by service-users, past service-users and carers and survivors. These stories of direct experience will be of great benefit to those interested in narrative enquiry, and to those studying and practising in the field of mental health.’

Our Encounters with Suicide (ed. Alec Grant, Judith Haire, Fran Biley and Brendan Stone): (£16)

The collection brings together a range of voices on the theme of suicide — those who have been suicidal, alongside the friends, family and staff who have lived and worked with them. Too often the rhetoric of ‘suicidology’ is occupied only by those who have never had personal experience of suicidality. The first-person voice is strangely absent. These frank accounts go some way to correcting the balance. We hope that these narratives will be helpful for people who may have had similar encounters, or are harbouring future suicidal intentions, and for those who care for them personally or professionally; that readers can use the stories in the book to make better sense of their own experiences and decisions. Ultimately we hope that the book will facilitate a more empathic understanding of the experiences of others generally, and of people who were close to and have been lost to suicide.

Our Encounters with Self Harm (ed. Charley Baker, Clare Shaw and Fran Biley) (available for pre-order) (£16)

This collection brings together a range of voices on the theme of self-harm – from those who have experienced self-harm directly, alongside the friends, family and staff who live and work with self-harm. Too often, our understanding of the unique and complex experiences of people who self-harm is limited to concepts of mental illness, disorder and disease. Yet these stories demonstrate the strength, survival and recovery of people with rich and diverse lives.Inspiring, hopeful and at times challenging to read, the contributors who have so generously shared their experiences in this book will promote understanding and compassion, improve attitudes and care, and offer hope to those who are personally encountering self-harm. In this respect, this book is of immense value to all those working with self-harm across a spectrum of services and roles, and to those living with self-harm.

Our Encounters with Madness (ed. Alec Grant, Fran Biley and Hannah Walker) (£17)

A collection of user, carer and survivor narratives, this book is grouped under five themes: On diagnosis; Stories of experience (of mental health problems); Experiencing the mental health system; On being a carer and Abuse and Survival. The book should be of great benefit to students of mental health, narrative enquiry, user and carers, and those interested in the pedagogy of suffering more generally. Unlike most other books in this genre, the narratives are unmediated. Written by experts by experience, there are no professional, biomedical or psychotherapeutic commentaries, which so often serve to capture, tame or sanitise such stories of direct experience.

Announcing ‘The Journal of Narrative Visions’ – An Electronic Journal of Narrative Ophthalmology, Optometry, and Vision Care

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‘The Journal of Narrative Visions’
An Electronic Journal of Narrative Ophthalmology, Optometry, and Vision Care

Call for Submissions
The Journal of Narrative Visions (JNV) is a newly established online journal that accepts narrative medicine and creative pieces related to ophthalmology, optometry, and vision care.

About the Journal
The mission of JNV is to provide an online space where healthcare workers, caregivers, and patients may reflect on their personal experiences caring for those with ophthalmological issues or personally living with vision problems through written narratives, poetry, and artwork.

Submission Process
If you would like to submit a piece, please follow our submission guidelines located under “Submissions” on our website www.narrativevisions.org. All submissions should be emailed to us.

Considerations for Acceptance
The JNV encourages submissions that reflect on personal experiences within the realm of vision care. Topics include, but are not limited to: healthcare for the blind, the effect of technology on restoring eyesight, global health missions, and the role of ophthalmologists in identifying systemic illness (diabetes, hypertension, thyroid disease, etc.).

For more information please contact us
e [email protected]
w www.narrativevisions.org

Sponsors
This journal is funded in part by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

Prescriptions: Artists’ Books on Wellbeing and Medicine – new publication

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The exhibition catalogue Prescriptions: Artists’ Books on Wellbeing and Medicine has been published as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities. The project is led by the University of Kent and explores the role book arts can play in raising awareness of the richness and value of lived accounts of illness.

The catalogue features work by 82 artists from 15 countries who participated in the exhibition Prescriptions that took place in the Beaney Art Museum in Canterbury in 2016. It also includes essays by medical humanities scholars that introduce this dynamic and intimate medium to the medical humanities community. It is accompanied by an interactive website where visitors can learn more about artists’ books and contribute to the project.

If you are a health professional educator, patient advocate or represent an arts and health organisation or other professional body and would like to receive a free copy of the catalogue to share with members of your group, please get in touch with Dr Stella Bolaki or on Twitter ‎@ArtistsBooks1. As this is a limited edition catalogue, it would be helpful to indicate in your message how you plan to use it and whether you or members of your group would be happy to leave feedback on our website following any activities planned.

The Lumen (Online launch)

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The Lumen magazine has launched its online presence. For more details, click here.
To read Issue One – click here.

The Lumen is a magazine for new literature and visual art dealing with the themes of illness, medicine and healthcare.

It aims to explore the texture, depth and diversity of the personal experience of medicine, from the realities of health, illness and suffering, to the intricate daily challenges facing healthcare professionals.

We welcome submissions of new prose, poetry, essays and visual art rom healthcare professionals, patients, students, and writers and artists of all backgrounds.

For all information regarding submissions and to order print copies, please email Lumen.

 

Dis-ease, Bad News, Pain, Weeping and Work: Volume 32.3 of the Journal of Medical Humanities out now

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Volume 32.3 of the Journal of Medical Humanities is now available.

Dis-ease or Disease? Ontological Rarefaction in the Medical-Industrial Complex, S. Scott Graham:

Recent scholarship in medical humanities has expressed strong concern over the ability of pharmaceuticals companies to medicalize discomfort and subsequently invent diseases. In this article, I explore the clinical debates over the ontology of the sinus headache as a possible counter-case. Extending Foucault’s concept of principles or rarefaction, this paper documents the efforts of clinicians to resist the pharmaceutically-provided understanding of the sinus headache. In so doing, it offers institutions of rarefaction and rarefactive assemblages as useful heuristics for the exploration of disease legitimization discourse.

Hearing Bad News, Janice Morse

Pain and its Metaphors: A Dialogical Approach, Stephen Loftus

How Music-Inspired Weeping Can Help Terminally Ill Patients, Kay Norton

For There is Work to be Done: Poetry and Commentary, Jonathan Reisman, Stacy Nigliazzo, Sarah Buckley, Ryan Childers & Audrey Shafer

The Language of Pain (8pm Radio 4, 2nd May 2015)

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Virginia Woolf claimed that English has no words to express what it feels like to be in pain. Professor Joanna Bourke from the Birkbeck Pain Project sets out to challenge this notion, exploring archives from the last two centuries to illustrate the rich metaphorical language people have used to express pain, and demonstrate why doctors need to pay attention to what their patients say. This one-hour programme includes contributions from social, cultural and music historians Dr Louise Hide, Dr Lucy Bending, Dr Simon Heighes, Professor Javier Moscoso and Dr Ana Carden-Coyne, as well as pain clinicians Professor Rita Charon and Dr Joanna Zakrzewska, and artist Dr Deborah Padfield. It has been produced by Isabel Sutton for Just Radio.

Saturday 2nd May, 8pm (Radio 4)

Anti-biosis? – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Microbe-Human Relations (CfP, Palgrave Communications)

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Palgrave Communications – the multidisciplinary, open access journal published by Palgrave Macmillan – is currently inviting article proposals and full papers for a new research article collection. ‘Anti-biosis? – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Microbe-Human Relations’ will be edited by Professor Steve Hinchliffe (University of Exeter, UK), Professor Clare Chandler (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK), Professor Komatra Chuengsatiansup (Ministry of Public Health, Thailand), and Professor Helen Lambert (Bristol Medical School, UK).

As a pinnacle of twentieth-century medical innovation, one could argue that antibiotics, and more broadly antimicrobials, have fundamentally altered ways of life. Everything from the control of common infectious diseases, to the possibility for densely housed, mass-produced livestock, to the availability of minor surgery, to the ability to treat life-threatening diseases are entangled with effective antibiosis.

And yet, the role of antimicrobials cannot be taken for granted. Resistance to these medicines is accelerated though their extensive and intensive uses. Resistant bacteria as well as mobile genetic elements are now known to be widespread in some communities and environments. The threat of resistance, alongside corporate, market and governance failures that militate against new therapies or alternative treatments, raise the spectre of a post-antibiotic future. Needless to say, the effects could be severe.

The requirement to find therapeutic alternatives, to develop more targeted therapies, to reduce unnecessary medicinal dependencies, all pose social, cultural and economic challenges, as the impetus to tackle antimicrobial resistance is differentially taken up – or imposed – and reconfigured across diverse scientific and biomedical establishments as well as governance regimes and cultures worldwide. We need to understand the place and use of medicines; we need to trace new pathways and overcome barriers to innovative practices; we need to analyse regulatory environments and we need to build social capacity for change. Only by moving beyond narrowly biomedical visions of resistance can we realise the aim of sustaining effective health treatments, while delivering food security and protecting livelihoods.

We invite papers that address questions such as:

  • What lessons can histories of medicine offer to the current antibiotic predicament?
  • How is antibiosis bound up with a particular worldview, and is this shifting in light of new scientific and social knowledge?
  • What social as well as technical innovations are possible as a means to address antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance and what are the barriers to their realisation or equitable distribution?
  • What are the consequences and opportunity costs of directing resources to addressing global resistance?

We invite papers on any of the following:

  • The social lives, meanings, uneven availability, demand for and appeal of antibiotics
  • Regulatory responses to resistance, including attempts to alter expectations, to change uses of medicines and unintended consequences of regulation
  • Cultural and historical approaches to antibiotics and resistance – how can cultural sensibilities inform practice?
  • Environmental and social geographies of antibiosis, their role in landscapes of production and pathways to change
  • Institutional responses to antimicrobial resistance as a new global imperative – how are health policies, laboratory practices and public health initiatives being variably reconfigured to manage resistant microbes?
  • How can understanding the antibiotic era, its history as well as ‘the biology of that history’, reconfigure approaches to life?
  • How microbes and the challenges of resistance change social science and humanities practices?
  • How do social understandings of scientific and other knowledge improve or help to inform current actions?
  • How can the history of ‘rational drug use’ serve to inform current framings of antimicrobial stewardship?

Papers are welcomed that speak to clinical, public health and community medicine as well as agricultural uses, one health perspectives and environmental persistence and transmission of resistant microbes and genes. We welcome papers across the humanities and social sciences as well as inter-disciplinary papers that have a strong and explicit social or humanities component.

Article proposals should be submitted to the editorial team by December 20th 2017. The latest deadline for full papers will be April 2018.

For any other information, please see journal website.

New Book: Portraits of Violence by Suzannah Biernoff

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Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement is a new book by Suzannah Biernoff which investigates the artistic, medical, and journalistic responses to facial injury in WWI.

Portraits of Violence explores the image and idea of facial disfigurement in one of its most troubling modern formations, as a symbol and consequence of war. It opens with Nina Berman’s iconic photograph Marine Wedding, which provoked a debate about the medical, military, and psychological response to serious combat injuries. While these issues remain urgent, it is equally crucial to interrogate the representation of war and injury. The concepts of valour, heroism, patriotism, and courage assume visible form and do their cultural work when they are personified and embodied. The mutilated or disabled veteran’s body can connote the brutalizing, dehumanizing potential of modern combat.

Suzannah Biernoff draws on a wide variety of sources mainly from WWI but also contemporary photography and computer games. Each chapter revolves around particular images: Marine Wedding is discussed alongside Stuart Griffiths’ portraits of British veterans; Henry Tonks’ drawings of WWI facial casualties are compared to the medical photographs in the Gillies Archives; the production of portrait masks for the severely disfigured is approached through the lens of documentary film and photography; and finally the haunting image of one of Tonks’ patients reappears in BioShock, a highly successful computer game. The book simultaneously addresses a neglected area in disability studies, puts disfigurement on the agenda for art history and visual studies, and makes a timely and provocative contribution to the literature on the First World War.

Suzannah Biernoff is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture at Birkbeck, University of London.

For reviews, or to purchase the book, please see University of Michigan Press website (orders before 8th May receive 30% off the list price with promotion code UMBIERNOFF).

Palgrave Communications – special issue launch: ‘On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing’

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Palgrave Communications, the multi-disciplinary open access journal published by Palgrave Macmillan, is excited to announce the launch of a special issue, ‘On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing’. This issue is edited by Dr Ali Haggett (Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, UK).

During the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, scientists, clinicians, policy-makers and patients have repeatedly mobilised concepts of ‘balance’ to explain the functions and malfunctions of bodies and minds and to promote wellbeing. This article collection aims to explore the ways in which changing notions of balance have been used to understand the causes of mental illness, to rationalise new approaches to its treatment and prevention, and to validate advice relating to balance in work and family life. Drawing on a range of approaches and methodologies, from the history of medicine, anthropology and psychology the articles collectively explore the various ways in which the concept of balance emerged in twentieth-century debates about psychological health and wellbeing in Britain and the United States. The collection also examines the ways in which the term has perhaps been utilised as a rhetorical construct – a ‘metaphorical device’ employed to articulate a range of broader social and cultural anxieties about well-being and modern living.

 

Book Announcement: Creative Arts in Humane Medicine

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Creative Arts in Humane Medicine:
A resource book that touches the heart of what it is to be human


Cheryl L. McLean writes: Humanistic medicine is a growing trend as more medical professionals integrate the arts into their practice to improve communication with patients and build better relationships. Creative Arts in Humane Medicine, (ed., Cheryl L. McLean, Brush Education) is a resource book for medical educators, practitioners, and students interested in effectively using the arts in medical education and practice to foster a more caring, empathic approach.

The collection is divided into four sections, “Educating for Empathy through the Arts”; Section 2, “The Arts in Medicine and Practitioner Self Care”; Section 3, “Navigating with Narrative Through Life Experience”; and Section 4, “The Creative Arts in Action for Change in Health”.

This post will present a few highlights from each of these sections.

The book opens with special attention paid to the overriding theme that resonates in this collection, that of care and fostering empathy . André Smith and his research team at The Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, demonstrates an innovative pedagogical approach using fabric art for teaching empathy to end-of-life health care providers. Similarly, in my own article that follows, I share the process of creating an ethnodrama to raise awareness about aging, mental health and autonomy and discuss how writing and creating an educational performance based on research led to greater caregiver empathy and human understanding.

Section 2 shows how the arts can help address practitioner self care needs while providing opportunities for understanding, healing and self expression. Alim Nagji MD, at The University of Alberta, who is also an actor, producer and writer, stresses that using theatre to help teach medical students to understand their patients’ stories can help foster empathy. Maura McIntyre at The Centre for Arts Informed Research, University of Toronto, has used theatre in her arts informed research and compellingly demonstrates through text and with script examples how reader’s theatre helps caregivers experience real stories of nursing home life. Rachael Allen, an Artist in Residence (AIR) at university anatomy and clinical skills laboratories at Newcastle, Durham and Northumbria Universities is an artist who has witnessed students engaged in educational lab work with prepared prosections of embalmed and plastinated specimens. Allen believes it is fundamentally important for health and humane medicine that students are offered opportunities to express and make sense of these intimate human encounters through arts processes.

Each of the contributors in section 3 of this book approach narrative and medicine in uniquely different ways, however, all writers share in common an underlying belief that humanity and dignity can be found through fostering the practitioner patient relationship. Jasna Schwind, a nurse educator and Associate Professor at Ryerson University, reports on her work informed by narrative inquiry while sharing her own illness story. Narrative and poetic inquirer John J. Guiney Yallop, from Acadia University, writes about his lived experiences with medical practitioners and, in so doing, poignantly illustrates the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient. Catherine L. Mah, MD, FRCPC, PhD a scientist, practitioner and researcher, University of Toronto, discusses in her article the uses of literature and the childhood novel in pediatrics practice suggesting the approach may help establish a foundation for narrative examination in the one on one interview.

In the closing section of this book there is an emphasis on using the arts in action for change in health. Louise Younie, a Clinical Senior Lecturer at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry writes about her journey of discovery through arts based inquiry and considers the transformative influences of the arts in medical education as well as within her own work. Bandy X. Lee MD at Yale University argues that for humane medicine to be realized there is also a critical need for collective and emotional healing. She proposes effective violence prevention may be one of the keys to change for societal health, human flourishing and creativity.

Creative Arts in Humane Medicine is a resource book featuring research, detailed accounts and real life examples of the arts in action in medical education and practice. The book informs and educates while touching the heart of what it is to be human, each article unfolding in its way as a story, a revealing performance about life, a creative act within itself.

Editor, Cheryl L. McLean is Publisher of The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP. Creative Arts in Humane Medicine, will be released in October 2013 and will be available in both hard copy and ebook formats. For further information about this book please contact the Editor directly.