Textual Therapies

A project combining English literature, experimental psychology, and computational linguistics, with a focus on entropy, abstraction, and mental health. James Carney's current research investigates how mental illness interacts with textual structures – specifically, using machine learning to investigate the potential therapeutic qualities of literature with different levels of entropy (unpredictability) and abstraction, for anxiety disorders versus depression. We also touch on wider questions of motivation in the health humanities and literary studies, the appeal of belief in the transformative power of literature, and the expansion of textual/computational inquiry out into structural anthropology.

Exploring the dangers of Disney’s take on poverty, mental health, and relationships. With backgrounds in medical humanities and school therapy and social work, Jenifer Fisher and Nikki York describe a recent project analysing Disney films in terms of how they depict poverty and mental illness and what solutions they present to these problems (almost always: get yourself rescued by one perfect relationship). Their analysis found a strong, and realistic, correlation between characters' adverse childhood experiences (ACE) score (a measure of neglect and abuse) and the incidence of poverty and mental illness in their portrayals. Our conversation explores concepts of the 'self-made man' and the 'virtuous poor', the reduction in emphasis on poverty in films since 1937, and the dangerous consequences of presenting singular relationships as solutions to mental health problems.

A series of narrative workshops helping make life better for fat people. Drawing on training in social science and medicine respectively, Rachel Fox and Kelly Park describe a series of workshops for medical students and fat participants designed to combat weight stigma. They outline their quantitative and qualitative findings, including the importance of physical presence in tackling the physiological and phenomenological aspects of fat phobia, the importance of narrative cues in permitting obliquely creative transformations of difficult experiences, and the importance of getting beyond one-sided correction of prejudice towards a more equal and reciprocal learning process.

An introduction to an often overlooked context for using narrative in healthcare: public health. A creative writer and public health practitioner and researcher, Lise Saffran explains the practice and rationale for using narrative in public health as opposed to clinical or medical contexts. We explore in particular the difficulties of constructing and assessing truth versus salience or persuasiveness in public health narratives, and how working with narrative changes the nature of research practice and communication.