"Stepping Through": Participatory Interactive Storytelling for Shared Experiences in Mental Health

基于创造力的方法被广泛用于心理健康治疗，社区支持和宣传。在这些背景下，由有精神疾病生活经历的人创造的媒体，包括参与性电影，对创造者和接受者都是有益的，前者是自我表达的手段，我的博士研究探索了互动媒体如何支持那些先经历过精神疾病的人创造精神疾病和康复的个人账户手事实上，互动媒体可以通过允许多个故事和视角在电影中共存（非线性讲故事），在描述体验时比传统视频提供更高水平的复杂性和细微差别。我的研究表明，将视频的力量与互动媒体的灵活性相结合，为参与者的观点开辟了一个和谐共存的空间，支持有效的自我表达和安全的自我披露。这反过来又鼓励观众同情地与参与者的经历联系起来，在这种背景下，对自己的同情和对他人的同情是克服内在耻辱和挑战精神疾病外部耻辱的基石。这项研究是高度跨学科的，结合了交互式媒体的参与式设计，在人机交互（HCI）领域内实践，社区媒体制作和心理健康实践。正如经常发生的高度跨学科的博士工作，它可以很难充分考虑到一个项目的不同方面在博士课程的持续时间。特别是，这项博士研究包含了大量与心理健康和社会科学相关的未开发的发现，迄今为止，这些发现在出版物和会议中一直从属于HCI的发现。ESRC博士后奖学金是巩固心理健康和社会科学领域博士研究的理想机会，同时支持我在心理健康参与性研究和基于视频的故事讲述的交叉点上开发应用研究学术概况的长期职业计划。该研究金将在博士研究成果的基础上，通过与各种学术和非学术受众开展传播和影响工作，并通过量身定制的培训方案和准备新的资助申请，为未来的研究工作奠定基础。在巩固工作方面，在研究金期间，我将通过精神卫生和社会科学方面的主要学术期刊传播研究成果;在精神卫生会议上介绍工作;编写关于与研究参与者共同撰写论文的指南，这是一种在跨社会科学参与性研究中日益重要的做法;举办传播讲习班，并为公共部门和第三部门利益攸关方创建一个方法工具包;并将我的博士研究参与者创作的电影《Stepping Through Interactive》分享给各种公众和专业观众，以充分支持参与者的自我表达和宣传议程。在为新的研究工作奠定基础方面，我将接受培训，以丰富我在基于实践的定性方法方面的现有经验，并拥有心理健康研究方法方面的专业知识;我将与我的导师一起申请威康信托早期职业奖，以使用我在博士学位中开发的讲故事技术来支持行为激活的适应，英国抑郁症的一线治疗，以适应不同的文化背景。拟议的工作计划在主题上与两个关键的DTP途径保持一致：福祉，健康和社区以及数据，通信和新技术。

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.