There has been a trend in recent years of “do no harm” as an organising principle around the re-telling of mental health survivor stories.
The suggestion is that personal story telling when re-telling episodes of trauma, suicide, self-harm,disordered eating poses unacceptable risk both to the storyteller and the audience. “Safety” was said to arise from a prescriptive “do no harm” framework. The underpinnings of a “do no harm” policy are that some aspects of personal stories are just too harmful to be told. Whilst I note that there is evidence around re-traumatisation for those who have
experienced trauma, my question is has the pendulum swung too far and ended in the sanitisation of authentic experience?
There has been a dominance of “do no harm” perspectives around storytelling in the mental health space for a number of years. However, there are alternative views.
Another way of looking at “do no harm” is that it is censorship of the storyteller.
In their article Recovering our Stories: A Small Act of Resistance (2012) Costa et al 2 argued that: Sharing experiences through stories or “testimonies by people who self-identify as having psychiatric disabilities has been central to the history of organizing resistance and change inand outside the psychiatric system”.
Costa goes on to say that mental health survivors have fought long and hard to have their voice and narratives understood as politicized accounts, and not just the “delegitimized rants” of people who are routinely dismissed because of their diagnosis. 3 How do you effectively tell your story if you are compelled to leave out meaningful aspects of it?
Costa 4 observes that often mental health organisations solicit personal stories from clients which focus on the slide into mental illness and the subsequent recovery. These stories are then used to build an organisational “brand” which can be used to justify program funding by those same organisations. Costa 5 notes that this is a trend of mental health organisations promoting their own agendas by co-opting client stories. A common trend is to promote the “resilience” and “recovery” aspects of the client’s story at the expense of other parts of their story, because it is more palatable in a funding context.
What is the personal meaning of being told you need to "edit" your story
because it is too harmful?
The person has already lived their experience and lives with their story every day. Editing your story due to a perception by organisations that an audience may be damaged by hearing it appears to be a
very “othering” experience for the storyteller. The implication is that there is something wrong with your story and, by implication, something wrong with you.
Empowered self-disclosure can be healing and a means of processing a story. An audience who is attending mental health story telling events are likely to be robust enough to handle the narrative of the speaker. If a potential audience member is fragile and feels that they would be triggered by hearing mental illness stories then they should make an empowered decision not to attend. In my view it shouldn’t be a burden upon the storyteller to have to risk assess the potential impacts on unknown audience members. Audience members need to assume that risk management themselves, after all they know their tolerances best.
Other perspectives on storytelling - “This is My Brave Australia”
In 2017 a grassroots charity “This is My Brave Australia” (TIMBA) emerged which provides a platform for storytelling which is based on the storyteller’s comfort. I would argue that this is a more politically empowered stance for the storyteller. There have been shows in Canberra (2), Central Coast, Mullumbimby, Perth.
TIMBA has conducted research after its shows which has found an overwhelming positivity of
experience by cast members and audience members in response to the telling of stories that don’t necessarily fit within the parameters of a “do no harm” framework. There has been no feedback which points to any harm from the experience from either party.
Conclusion
For too long “do no harm” has dominated the discourse in mental health storytelling. Empowering the storyteller to share their unvarnished experience and the recalibrating of the pendulum to allow greater authenticity in the story-telling message is needed.
As a corollary to this argument, Mental Health First Aid courses teach that the conversation around suicidality is important to have and disclosure of a person’s suicide plan is important to elicit and discuss. The narrative around suicide prevention is “talk about it”. RUOK Day urges the same thing. We need to find a ground where storytellers can talk about suicide and their trauma - if they want to - and if they feel it is part of their recovery journey. TIMBA has shown that an audience is moved and drawn to the authenticity of the storyteller and will suspend judgment and empathise with the speaker. It may even challenge and audience to challenge stigma and prejudices and become part of the wider community wanting to lobby for social change around mental illness.