The medical humanities is a multidisciplinary field that includes the arts and social sciences in medical training. More broadly, this holistic approach to healing goes beyond the merely physical, helping people discover innate resources to ‘self-recover’ from trauma. Dawn Garisch, Founder of the Life Righting Collective, explores the role writing plays in healing.
What are the medical humanities and why is it important to integrate other disciplines with medical training?
The social sciences and the arts have much to contribute to the health sciences around wellbeing. Story is often understood to be our ‘operating system’. However, when the stories we tell are harmful, we need ways to change. Altering the narrative can allow us to make better decisions around care of self, others and the planet. As the writer CS Lewis has said: “You can’t go back to the beginning and change what happened, but you can start from where you are and change the ending.”
Why does South Africa, a country that has experienced historical and ongoing traumas, need interventions drawn from the medical humanities?
Regular creative practice can be healing and transformative, and creativity is a low-cost, in-built resource. Learning to write about one’s life in a facilitated group setting is a powerful tool for discovery and recovery. The need for interventions that address mental health problems is huge and requires group processes rather than one-on-one sessions with a mental health professional.
What is ‘life writing’ and why is it a useful, non-medical way to improve resilience to trauma? Please share your findings and explain how such interventions can be replicated.
Our courses are designed to activate the writer’s creativity so they can go beyond the anecdote or a self-defeating narrative. When we write out sensory experience and associations, we enlist the unconscious mind and new information can arise. This can counter assumptions about the self and others, and expand understanding and possibility. Reading one’s work in a safely held group allows the writer to be seen and heard, which builds their confidence. Training facilitators in this method could expand outreach.
How does the Life Righting Collective use writing to foster ‘self-recovery’?
Picking up a pen, writing about a traumatic event and giving it shape outside the distressed body are acts of agency in situations where the writer has felt powerless. The rational mind shuts down the story with interpretation, whereas writing creatively can release the story into new insight.
Retelling a story on paper can help the writer to change their relationship to what happened and come to terms with their lives. In addition, bearing witness to the zeitgeist and personal circumstance can help the writer to advocate for change in the community or in policy. We can get to know one another through sharing memoirs; dispensing with our assumptions about race, religion, nationality, gender, class, ability and age; and develop empathy towards ourselves, others and the natural world. Recognising our tendency to assume is a very powerful corrective in improving relationships.
What makes writing a particularly good therapeutic tool, especially as South Africa has low levels of literacy?
Literacy is a limitation. However, finding creative ways to express oneself does not need high levels of literacy. Helping people with inadequate access to education to write about what they know is a huge boost to confidence. Language is another potential barrier to courses and the Life Righting Collective is seeking funding to train facilitators in all South African languages.
How can corporate investments in literacy and the arts advance development in South Africa?
Art is not a luxury or a pastime. We are all born creative as a core evolutionary advantage. Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for his study of mammals, found that we need to play to learn. Regular creative practice keeps us curious, engaged and inspired, and helps us to try out our options in a safe imaginative space. The lack of non-didactic arts education in our schools and the paucity of funding for the arts seriously hamper our emotional literacy. In turn, this deficit undermines our capacity for relationship, community, employment and effective governance and advocacy.
Please provide an example of successful collaboration in this discipline, together with the outcomes thereof.
The Life Righting Collective ran a team-building writing course for staff at the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) (https://cdkn.org/). From this initiative, CDKN has employed our methodology in rural communities in Africa and India to support those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change to write down their experience. These testimonies will be presented in international spaces to influence policy.
DAWN GARISCH
- CEO of the Life Righting Collective
- admin@liferighting.com
- www.liferighting.com