New Thinking: Ways of Talking about Health

Des Fitzgerald talks to the winners of the AHRC and Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Awards 2020 which recognise people and projects helping to understand and transform our quality of life, health and wellbeing using arts and humanities research. Their work has challenged the way we approach medical science and informed health policy in the UK and internationally - and, includes research into how the stigma surrounding obesity contributes to the obesity crisis and innovative art therapy techniques with long term benefits for patients. We hear how the arts and humanities are helping us to challenge our approach to medical science. From sociological research that sheds new light on the nation’s obesity crisis to research into the ability of creative writing and theatre to improve quality of life for those with long-term mental health challenges. Angela Woods is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University. Her work has focused on hearing voices that others don’t. It is an experience people typically associate with distress – with the suffering of psychosis, with the fear of the unusual or unshared, with the shame arising from social stigma. Over the last eight years, the Hearing the Voice team have pursued three closely related goals: to help those who are distressed by their voices, to find out what voices are like and why they happen, and to explore how hearing voices is an important and meaningful part of human experience. Oli Williams is a postdoctoral fellow based at King’s College London. His doctoral research joins the dots between inequality, health, and everyday life. It demonstrates how the ‘war on obesity’ promotes stigma. Oli’s aim was to understand how this stigma impacted people living in one of the most deprived areas in England. His findings highlight how ineffective weight-based stigma is at preventing weight-gain or promoting weight-loss. Instead this stigma detrimentally impacts people’s health and discriminates against poorer sections of society. Victoria Bates is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Bristol University. Her expansive research expertise ranges from nineteenth-century forensic medicine to current-day sensory studies. Victoria has recently focused on developing new types of impactful interdisciplinarity, through partnerships between medical humanities researchers and professionals in creative and design industries. Her Future Leaders Fellowship, ‘Sensing Spaces of Healthcare’ brings together history, medical humanities, spatial/sensory studies and design for the first time. Laura Drysdale is Director of the Restoration Trust. Since 2015 The Restoration Trust has partnered Norfolk Record Office and local mental health providers to run Change Minds, an archives and mental health programme. Change Minds engages people with mental health challenges in a transformative co-created archival adventure. Over 15 three-hour sessions, a facilitated group of around 10 people investigate case records of patients in local 19th century. asylums. Everyone choses a patient and learns research skills as they investigate their life story. They use this research as the basis for creative writing, art and theatre, leading to a shared public event. AHRC and Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Awards 2020 • Best Research Award: The Hearing the Voice team at Durham University • Best Early Career Research Award: Dr Oli Williams, The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Kings College London • Best International Award: Dr Dora Vargha, Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, University of Exeter • Best Community Research Award: Laura Drysdale, Director of Restoration Trust • Leadership Award: Dr Victoria Bates, Senior Lecturer in Modern History (University of Bristol)