“Recovering our Stories”: A Small Act of Resistance
By L. Costa, Jijian Voronka, D. Landry, J. Reid, Becky Mcfarlane, D. Reville, K. Church. 2012
222 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story” within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a3d095c6d54857e7e95a57e51997df30cb17155
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In General Health Professions
In Sociology and Political Science
In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- Between exclusion and colonisation: seeking a place for mad people’s knowledge in academia (2015, background): “We often find ourselves giving not just our story but also the knowledge that has emerged from our experiences only to have it re-framed, serving various purposes and different agendas, and ultimately alienated from us (Costa et al. 2012).”
- Survivor research and Mad Studies: the role and value of experiential knowledge in mental health research (2017, background): “This goes some way towards ensuring that we hear the experiences and views of service users, and is certainly the approach that I have taken in the past (Costa et al. 2012; Faulkner et al. 2008).”
- Service user/survivor-led research in mental health: epistemological possibilities (2017, background): “In Canada this was the case very early on (Church and Reville 1988); it characterises some of the chapters in Mad Matters (Menzies, LeFrançois, and Reaume 2013) and there is equivalent if more nuanced concern expressed, for example, about who owns our ‘stories’ (Costa et al. 2012).”