Psych Unit Gangs: An Autoethnography.

The stigma against people with mental illness is a well-worn subject; however, stigma between groups of people with different mental illnesses is rarely discussed. Within the context of a psychiatric hospital, hierarchies form among patients based on symptomatology and diagnosis. In this perspectives piece, I explore, how, in my experiences with being on the bottom of this hierarchy as a person with a schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic illness in a psychiatric hospital. I, and my fellow "psychotics," were stigmatized and outcasted by other groups of individuals who were diagnosed with mental illnesses that are considered less serious than psychosis. I explore how one stigmatized, outcasted group (people with substance use and mood disorders) construct power relationships over an even more highly stigmatized, marginalized group (people with psychotic disorders). Utilizing Goffmanian and Tajfel theories, the perspective explores stigma within a total institution, and the formation of in-groups and out-groups. I explore how people, upon entering the psychiatric hospital unit, know almost immediately whether they belong to the dominant group or the subordinate group, and I conclude with recommendations to reduce the stigma of psychotic disorders within popular culture.

The Lawlessness of Loss: Poetry and Autoethnographic Writing as Therapy in Grief and Loss.

This study seeks to locate and evaluate 'poetry therapy' as a form of therapeutic method for use by practitioners of humanistic psychotherapy especially when used in responding to the traumas associated with grief and loss. Following an initial survey of the literature, the study will explore some examples of the use of poetry therapy for grief, with an especial qualitative focus upon the insights to be gained from first-hand autoethnographic accounts. The study undertakes a literature review which also includes some consideration of peer-reviewed autoethnographic explorations authored by theorists and practitioners of psychotherapy in order to identify what additional insights, if any, may be gained from accessing these personal accounts of process. In particular, the humanist perspective upon grief should be tempered with pragmatism so as to avoid regarding poetry as a reductive sentimentalising of trauma: encountering loss may be seen as experiencing subjection to a 'lawless' world. The study confirms the use of poetry therapy and autoethnographic writing has significant utility and potential, whilst recognising the challenges for empirical confirmation, the need for practitioners to be sensitive to the nuances of the source materials and the subtlety of appropriate application for different client perspectives and groups.

From group mentoring to collective liberation: The imperative to decolonize nursing academia.

BACKGROUND: Four Black early-career faculty members, one Black doctoral student, and a Black senior faculty member, (herein referred to as scholars), previously engaged in cross-cultural mentoring with a White senior researcher to bolster their scholarship. PURPOSE: In the years following the 2020 racial reckoning, the scholars were motivated to reconvene by the realization that traditional scholarship activities of academia ignore historical educational oppression and fail to account for the contemporary effects of racism and discrimination rooted in American colonialism. METHODS: Collaborative autoethnography, a decolonizing qualitative approach to research, was used to explicate our journeys in academia. The tenets of Freire's critical pedagogy (conscientização, scholarship, praxis) framed our collective experiences. DISCUSSION: We describe resisting academic structures of power, discrimination, and disadvantage through reformation, crafting a vision statement, and utilizing positions of influence. CONCLUSION: To decolonize nursing academia, we implore the scholarly community to pursue liberation and contest structures that center Whiteness and marginalize collectivism and collaboration.

Autoethnography study: how I learned to do 3D printing as a rehabilitation practitioner.

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) is increasingly utilized in healthcare. Some rehabilitation professionals employ 3D printing for orthoses, prostheses, and assistive technologies (AT). However, anecdotal evidence suggests that many practitioners have reservations about adopting 3D printing into their practices, and empirical research in this area is limited. The aim of the study was to document my experience while learning 3D printing. In this autoethnographic study, journal entries and photos of the artifacts were collected during the process of learning 3D printing. These data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes were identified: Being motivated to learn 3D printing, Experiencing challenges and implementing possible solutions, and Achieving developmental milestones in learning 3D printing. These milestones offered practical insights and solutions for new learners by providing a roadmap for navigating the journey of learning 3D printing. This personal experience offered opportunities and posed challenges in the context of learning to use 3D printing in the rehabilitation field. It is hoped that this study will inspire others to explore 3D printing and potentially contribute to the development of 3D printing training programs for students and rehabilitation professionals.

The study contributes to understanding of 3D printers use for individuals with disabilities, whether in occupational therapy or non-occupational therapy contexts.By highlighting the issues and challenges documented in this study, individuals with no prior exposure to 3D printing can better manage their expectations when embarking on their own 3D printing journey.This experience can serve as an inspiration for occupational therapy students and other students in rehabilitation programs to share their own stories about their encounters with 3D printing, potentially sparking new approaches to practice.The knowledge and experience gained through 3D printing might help to develop a 3D printing training workshop.

Screen time, mute, mixed messages, and panic: An international auto-ethnographic study of knowledge workers during a pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic provoked worldwide changes to the workplace, leading to rapid changes in lifestyles and working conditions. While organizations and governments struggled to develop regulations and policies, individuals were forced to find ways to manage work and life. During the pandemic and quarantine, a group of knowledge workers from around the world convened virtually and agreed to use qualitative autoethnographic methods to study how the quarantine disrupted their conventional patterns of work and care. In this article, we apply two communication perspectives-uncertainty reduction theory and re-silience-to participant diaries to understand how participants represent internal and external stressors, the efforts diarists employed to overcome those stressors, and their varying success in doing so. Post-hoc application of these communication concepts suggests that the diarists, though privileged in some ways, were not exempt from the social, professional, and emotional consequences of the pandemic and that their efforts to enact resilience were unevenly successful, especially in relation to their use of communications technology. Diarists reported struggling with uncertainty at numerous levels and that uncertainty contributed to individual emotional and cultural distress. Disruptions to work, home, and communities significantly affected wellbeing and ability to cope with challenges. Added to this were the complex and competing roles that diarists felt as they struggled to work from home, parent, and remain engaged.

Anti-stigmatizing: a collaborative autoethnography on recovery from depression.

Introduction: Despite extensive research on clinical treatments for depression, there remains a significant gap in understanding of the lived experiences and recovery journeys of those with depression. This study sought to explore the recovery process through an "anti-stigmatizing" lens, emphasizing the cultural-psychological mechanisms at play and the importance of personal narratives in shaping the recovery trajectory. Methods: Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, this report focuses on the first author's journey of depression recovery. This research methodology allows for an in-depth exploration of subjective experiences, with a specific emphasis on the interaction between societal stigma, personal identity, and mental-health challenges. Results: It is found that the depression-recovery experience can be divided into four stages from an anti-stigma perspective: (1) encountering the public stigma of emotions; (2) internalizing the stigma to a self-stigma; (3) "decriminalizing" the expected stigma of a "depressed" identity through diagnosis; and (4) being able to cope with and understanding the public stigma relating to depression when facing it again. Key factors that were found to contribute to recovery were self-awareness, community empowerment, and recognition and acceptance by close friends and family. Discussion: We propose a reconceptualization of depression that incorporates a societal perspective on internalized stigma. Recovery from depression is not merely a medical process; it also pertains to how the patient frees themselves from public stigma. The results strongly indicate the need for a paradigm shift toward a more inclusive and empathetic approach to mental-health care, and we emphasize the importance of personal narratives in depression recovery.

Psychiatrists' Illustration of Awe in Empathic Listening Assessments: A Pilot Study.

Background "Awe" is typically an inspiring emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli signifying the transcendence beyond all cognitive frames of reference when we encounter the unexpected. Physicians' experience of awe in clinical care interactions has not been studied in an empirical, evidence-based way. We aim to present a focused study of awe in a psychiatrist's empathic listening (EL) assessments and propose an evidence-based framework to study it. Methodology This is an exploratory case series of a psychiatrist's EL interactions (mean duration/x̄ of 46.17 minutes) with six patients (two males and four females) aged 32-72 years (x̄ =54.67, σ = 16.64). Using the method of autoethnography, the verbal and nonverbal aspects of the EL assessments were analyzed and open-coded to generate qualitative data. Results The study revealed that the data in all the case studies could be classed into two thematic groups, namely, mindfulness and transpersonal mindfulness. The emotions of "awe" and "non-agency" were ubiquitous in all six case studies both for the psychiatrist and patients. Conclusions Recognizing the awe and non-agency in EL interaction is essential in conceptualizing the "mindfulness-to-transcendence" framework and the first step toward the evidence-based study of transcendence/metaphysics in phenomenological psychiatry.

Autoethnographic Reflections on Mental Distress and Medication Management: Conceptualising Biomedical and Recovery Models of Mental Health.

This article uses autoethnography to explore the author's lived experiences of mental distress and how she has conceptualised and explained these symptoms to herself using both the biomedical and recovery models of care. Autoethnography is a process of personal reflection that enables connection between the personal and the political. Experiences of mental distress are recounted alongside the decision to reduce medication. This personal experience is then explored in the context of limited evidence base on the effectiveness of reducing medication and the situation in which prescribers often feel reluctant to recommend and support service users in these choices. Shared decision-making in medication management is introduced which is an approach which draws on the models of recovery and co-production challenging traditional biomedical approaches which locate the prescriber as expert. Moreover, the radical service user led model is highlighted, within which, the Hearing Voices Network and Open Dialogue offer alternative approaches which promote co-production and empowerment. The author connects the personal to the political and reflects on her dual identity as an expert-by-experience and social work academic. She details how she has drawn on biomedical explanations to describe her distress yet has been challenged by the recovery model throughout her journey of recovery. She concludes that her own position, in identifying herself as an academic and expert-by-experience is an important step in challenging notions of expertise and approaches to mental health care.

The time for patient partnership in medical education has arrived: Critical reflection through autoethnography from a physician turned patient.

PURPOSE: This paper explores experiences of a physician who in one life-altering day awoke in intensive care and had to embark on a complex journey as full-time patient. It identifies the important literature, albeit limited, from a unique dual lens view of physician turned patient, and analyzes the potential for advancing medical education by recognizing the expertise that patients possess from lived experience. METHODOLOGY: An autoethnography study was undertaken to unpack data obtained from lived patient experience during a two-and-a-half-year long hospitalization. Themes were captured in a series of eleven scenarios. Findings included critical reflection from the patient, medical educator, and research perspectives. Data was cross-referenced with relevant literature. RESULTS: Seven themes emerged upon critical analysis of the eleven scenarios that described real-life healthcare encounters of the physician turned patient. These often-neglected themes from medical education include experiential learning, reflection, what counts as medical care, vulnerability, patient-centred care, agency, and patient expertise. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights differences between intellectual-experiential knowledge, and challenges medical education to harness the expertise that patients possess. It contributes to scholarly discourses by demonstrating the utility of autoethnography in medical education, critiques traditional medical education models, expands the breadth of what constitutes knowledge, and invites medical educators to actively involve patients as equal stakeholders in curricula.

Moving Through a Textual Space Autistically.

This article is an investigation of neurodivergent reading practices. It is a collectively written paper where the focus is as much on an autoethnographic exploration of our autistic readings of autism/autistic fiction as it is on the read texts themselves. The reading experiences described come primarily from Yoon Ha Lee's Dragon Pearl (2019) and Dahlia Donovan's The Grasmere Cottage Mystery (2018), which we experience as opposite each other in how they depict their neurodivergent characters and speak to us as autistic readers. Through the article, we describe a formation of neurodivergent (critical) collective readings of autism/autistic fiction. The article contributes to an academic and activistic discourse around neurodivergent reader responses and power relations between neurodivergent and neurotypical readers and authors.

Practicing Confidence: An Autoethnographic Exploration of the First Years as Physicians.

Phenomenon: Every year is heralded with a cohort of newly-minted medical school graduates. Through intense residency training and supervision, these learners gradually develop self-assurance in their newfound skills and ways of practice. What remains unknown, however, is how this confidence develops and on what it is founded. This study sought to provide an insider view of this evolution from the frontline experiences of resident doctors. Approach: Using an analytic collaborative autoethnographic approach, two resident physicians (Internal Medicine; Pediatrics) documented 73 real-time stories on their emerging sense of confidence over their first two years of residency. A thematic analysis of narrative reflections was conducted iteratively in partnership with a staff physician and a medical education researcher, allowing for rich, multi-perspective input. Reflections were analyzed and coded thematically and the various perspectives on data interpretation were negotiated by consensus discussion. Findings: In the personal stories and experiences shared, we take you through our own journey and development of confidence, which we have come to appreciate as a layered and often non-linear process. Key moments include fears in the face of the unknown; the shame of failures (real or perceived); the bits of courage gained by everyday and mundane successes; and the emergence of our personal sense of growth and physicianship. Insights: Through this work, we - as two Canadian resident physicians - have ventured to describe a longitudinal trajectory of confidence from the ground up. Although we enter residency with the label of 'physician,' our clinical acumen remains in its infancy. We graduate from residency still as physicians, but decidedly different in terms of our knowledge, attitudes, and skills. We sought to capitalize on the vulnerability and authenticity inherent in autoethnography to enrich our collective understanding of confidence acquisition in the resident physician and its implications for the practice of medicine.

Being fractal: Embodying antiracism values in course-based participatory action research.

In the winter and spring of 2021, I-a White, female, graduate student-taught a six-month course surrounding the theme: Disrupting Systemic Racism at our University Through Action Research. I was challenged to lead a meaningful course in a two-dimensional virtual space, amidst rising death tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rhythmic beat of calls for racial justice pulsing through our Zoom class periods. This experience opened my eyes as an educator, budding community psychologist, and an antiracist White accomplice. In this critical autoethnographic case study, I recount my experience adapting the community organizing principle of fractals into a pedagogical framework that guided my instructional practices in a community psychology course. In doing so, I echo the call for community psychologists to connect our work more tightly to Black, Indigenous, and people of Color social justice organizers and movements to fortify the field's relevance in the struggle for racial justice.

Five Coffin Nails to Informed Consent: An Autoethnography of Suffering Complications in Breastfeeding.

This autoethnography describes an illness episode caused by breastfeeding complications. It focuses on informed consent processes accompanying this illness episode. Informed consent is a cornerstone of ethical medical practice and has to be obtained before a medical intervention can legally be implemented. It is therefore not trivial that in practice, informed consent processes often fail to achieve what they are set out to. With this autoethnography, I want to provide a review of how informed consent processes can fail in the context of breastfeeding, but also draw attention to what these situations can mean and feel like for those affected. I provide in-depth descriptions of five scenes from my illness episode each representing a different barrier to informed consent. The scenes were developed based on emotional recall and written to grant access to the emotional dimensions of my experience in the tradition of evocative autoethnography. As part of my story, I engage with various issues like practices of prescribing, communicative requirements in vulnerable situations to ensure understanding, the dual purpose of informed consent in the moral and legal realm, and the moralized breastfeeding discourse. Possible routes for change to abolish or reduce described barriers to informed consent are discussed.

"We All Sort of Jump to That Relationship Piece": Science Teachers' Collaborative Professional Learning About the Role of Relationships in Argumentation.

This study investigates how a professional learning approach that draws on elements from collaborative autoethnography (CAE) can support science teachers' learning about argumentation. It provides an account of how six secondary science teachers collectively explored their views and understandings of the importance of relationships for fostering argumentative sensemaking in classrooms. The educators partnered across four sessions to identify themes that emerged from their autoethnographic writings and discussions. The construct of "diffraction" later helped provide a situated, entangled analysis of how ideas traveled within the group over time. Findings highlight how teachers surfaced the importance of cultivating trusting classroom relationships (between teachers and students as well as between students with one another) to foster the social dialogic elements of argumentation and collective sensemaking. This insight is one not generally emphasized in teacher professional development related to argumentation and has only recently been examined in the research literature. Teachers also reclaimed the idea of "rigor" to encompass discourse that is connected to students' lives and engages them in knowledge-building with others. This study demonstrates how a CAE-inspired teacher professional development model that emphasizes teacher agency and professional knowledge can help educators develop nuanced understandings of argumentation. As more classrooms focus on engaging students in argumentative practices, this study suggests the need for the field of science education to shift its focus to attend more fully to the role of classroom relationships, vulnerability, and trust. This study also suggests promising strategies for helping teachers increase their commitment to enacting productive and expansive classroom argumentation practices that center students' experiences, value diverse sensemaking, and increase equitable opportunities for learning.

Responding to the call of the NHS Nightingale, but at what cost? An auto-ethnography of a volunteer frontline mental health trainer's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Healthcare workers, globally, volunteered time and skills to the COVID-19 pandemic frontline response. In March 2020, the predicted high demand for extra critical care beds led to the rapid construction of the UK National Health Service (NHS) Nightingale field hospital, London. I volunteered to develop and deliver psychological preparedness training - coined 'Psychological PPE' - to over 2300 frontline staff over an 8-week period. Existing research has identified broad themes of the impact working on the COVID-19 frontline has on healthcare workers but does not capture in-depth accounts of individuals' experiences. Using autoethnographic enquiry, this research explores my frontline experience at the NHS Nightingale during this time, and the personal impact this had on me. Reflexive thematic analysis explored themes of recognition and sacrifice, emotional lability and fragility, and the impact of transitions. Findings inform personal recovery, as well as future research and policy development pertaining to the sustainable recovery of our NHS people.

Doctoral research, COVID-19, and political crisis in Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, and the UK: challenges, responses, and recommendations.

Background: Conducting doctoral research is a challenging endeavour, a challenge which as the growing literature on the subject has shown, the COVD-19 pandemic has made even more so. For some doctoral researchers, however, the pandemic has also been accompanied by political unrest and military conflict, putting them and their networks at risk and making their research especially difficult to sustain. Methods: We have used a collaborative auto-ethnography, and we, a group of seven doctoral researchers based in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan and UK have written our experiences. Results: Drawing upon the results of a collaborative auto-ethnography (CAE), this article records and discusses the experiences of a group of doctoral researchers who with the support of their organisation, the Social Science for Severe Stigmatised Skin Diseases (5S) Foundation, have been attempting to cope with both the pandemic and internal instability and strife. After firstly setting the context, the article explains why for the purposes of this paper CAE was adopted as our method, and then documents and discusses the experiences of seven doctoral researchers based in Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, and the UK, doing so in terms of four different themes: New Ways of Working and Its Impact, Change and Delay, Mental Health and Well-Being Impact, and Qualities and Capacities. Conclusion: What these experiences tell us is that this group of doctoral researchers have found themselves in extremely challenging situations, which have placed exceptionally high demands on them and their support networks, and this has had an impact on their health and well-being although also been the catalyst for some more positive development. Given their lived experiences, the article finishes with a series of recommendations for future research projects of this kind.

"Stop acting like a child - you're immature": The reversed ageism of practicing self-injury as adult women and the reclaiming of our bodies.

The practice of self-injury is considered deviant and pathological, and the stereotype of a self-injuring individual is a young, white, middle-class woman. By using an autoethnographic approach, I elucidate how four women and I, aged 35-51, with experiences of self-injury in adulthood, use, internalize, and speak through dominant discourses of self-injury. The practice of self-injury is an embodied one, and self-injury is stereotypically associated with immature, irresponsible, and emotionally unstable young women. As adult women who self-injure, we use and speak through this representation, which, to some extent, affects our self-image and identity as we are often "misrecognized" as full partners in everyday social interaction or when we represent our professions. Still, we resist the idea of self-injury as stemming from immaturity, and we work to reclaim our bodies and agency from the medicalized, ageist assumptions of the practice of self-injury. By doing this, we can also rewrite and transform the meaning of this practice. Our self-inflicted wounds or scars do not define who we are nor our level of maturity, intelligence, and attractiveness. Thus, we acknowledge that we have the right to our own bodies and what we do to that body.

Critical Reflexivity and Positionality on the Scholar-Practitioner Continuum: Researching Women's Embodied Subjectivities in Sport.

The sports world has many prejudices that have been converted into common sense. Some relate to the idea of athletes being strong or pretty but endowed with little intelligence. There is another view, perhaps a little more accurate, around the reification of consciousness in the name of the automation and maximum outcome of the body. Both views are informed by Cartesian thinking, perpetuating the mind-body dichotomy. Such a dichotomy is spread in several other areas in our society, expressed as binaries. We meet a binary when conducting research as well, disembodying the researcher as someone who is neutral, objective, and highly rational, and someone who, in synthesis, performs good mental work, but who must not let feelings intrude. On the contrary, we argue that we are embodied beings who are often not able to (and maybe should not) become detached from previous experiences and knowledge when conducting research. Even though this can present itself as a challenge, we consider that a fluid non-binary positioning encompasses actions holistically and leads to tasks being performed on a continuum. The purpose of this paper is to explore the reflexive process embedded in carrying out a PhD project committed to studying the production of the embodied subjectivities of a group of women high-level athletes in karate. The researcher inserted in the researched environment was not a high-level athlete; however, she had several experiences competing at the amateur level in different countries and faced experiences that were, to some extent, similar to those of the elite athletes. She used her previous experiences as a karateka, researcher, and woman to inform her research-doing since the intersectional social issues faced by her and lived queer feelings motivated her research questions. She plunged into a process of self-reflection and counted on the guidance of the other authors to organise her learning in order to use it in her scholarship. That was, primarily, an experience of "practice" of subjectivity through examining others' production of subjectivity, besides strengthening a positionality that lacked self-confidence. Thus, we explore issues around the researcher-practitioner theoretical-practical continuum of research-doing, presenting a journey that became empowering.

Academic contributions to the development of evidence and policy systems: an EPPI Centre collective autoethnography.

BACKGROUND: Evidence for policy systems emerging around the world combine the fields of research synthesis, evidence-informed policy and public engagement with research. We conducted this retrospective collective autoethnography to understand the role of academics in developing such systems. METHODS: We constructed a timeline of EPPI Centre work and associated events since 1990. We employed: Transition Theory to reveal emerging and influential innovations; and Transformative Social Innovation theory to track their increasing depth, reach and embeddedness in research and policy organisations. FINDINGS: The EPPI Centre, alongside other small research units, collaborated with national and international organisations at the research-policy interface to incubate, spread and embed new ways of working with evidence and policy. Sustainable change arising from research-policy interactions was less about uptake and embedding of innovations, but more about co-developing and tailoring innovations with organisations to suit their missions and structures for creating new knowledge or using knowledge for decisions. Both spreading and embedding innovation relied on mutual learning that both accommodated and challenged established assumptions and values of collaborating organisations as they adapted to closer ways of working. The incubation, spread and embedding of innovations have been iterative, with new ways of working inspiring further innovation as they spread and embedded. Institutionalising evidence for policy required change in both institutions generating evidence and institutions developing policy. CONCLUSIONS: Key mechanisms for academic contributions to advancing evidence for policy were: contract research focusing attention at the research-policy interface; a willingness to work in unfamiliar fields; inclusive ways of working to move from conflict to consensus; and incentives and opportunities for reflection and consolidating learning.