Family health narratives : midlife women’s concepts of vulnerability to illness

Perceptions of vulnerability to illness are strongly influenced by the salience given to personal experience of illness in the family. This article proposes that this salience is created through autobiographical narrative, both as individual life story and collectively shaped family history. The paper focuses on responses related to health in the family drawn from semi-structured interviews with women in a qualitative study exploring midlife women’s health. Uncertainty about the future was a major emergent theme. Most respondents were worried about a specified condition such as heart disease or breast cancer. Many women were uncertain about whether illness in the family was inherited. Some felt certain that illness in the family meant that they were more vulnerable to illness or that their relatives’ ageing would be mirrored in their own inevitable decline, while a few expressed cautious optimism about the future. In order to elucidate these responses, we focused on narratives in which family members’ appearance was discussed and compared to that of others in the family. The visualisation of both kinship and the effects of illness, led to strong similarities being seen as grounds for worry. This led to some women distancing themselves from the legacies of illness in their families. Women tended to look at the whole family as the context for their perceptions of vulnerability, developing complex patterns of resemblance or difference within their families

The Other Child: Health Narratives of Adults Raised with a Chronically Ill Sibling

The sibling relationship brings with it a powerful experience and unique effects on individual development. Within this paper the personal health narratives of adult siblings who grew up with a chronically ill brother or sister are explored in depth. Using a naturalistic, qualitative paradigm and approach to the research a small sample of participants (N=7) provided in depth, semi-structured interviews geared to explore their experiences growing up with their siblings, and later effects on the development of personal health narratives. Using thematic analysis, a number of themes were identified including: (a) at home: finding out, the early relationship, early environment, and family role; (b) retrospective early needs; (c) anxiety; (d) guilt; e) increased empathy, compassion, and awareness; (f) a different worldview; (g) the sibling turn; (h) health perspective and experiences: retrospective health narratives at the family level, mediated adult health narratives, and general self-care. A model of understanding the development of health narratives and general self-care is offered for well siblings. The utility of these themes for clinical practice and directions for future research are discussed

The Other Child: Health Narratives of Adults Raised with a Chronically Ill Sibling

The sibling relationship brings with it a powerful experience and unique effects on individual development. Within this paper the personal health narratives of adult siblings who grew up with a chronically ill brother or sister are explored in depth. Using a naturalistic, qualitative paradigm and approach to the research a small sample of participants (N=7) provided in depth, semi-structured interviews geared to explore their experiences growing up with their siblings, and later effects on the development of personal health narratives. Using thematic analysis, a number of themes were identified including: (a) at home: finding out, the early relationship, early environment, and family role; (b) retrospective early needs; (c) anxiety; (d) guilt; e) increased empathy, compassion, and awareness; (f) a different worldview; (g) the sibling turn; (h) health perspective and experiences: retrospective health narratives at the family level, mediated adult health narratives, and general self-care. A model of understanding the development of health narratives and general self-care is offered for well siblings. The utility of these themes for clinical practice and directions for future research are discussed

"Kia Mauri Tau!" Narratives of recovery from disabling mental health problems

A bicultural research team at the University of Waikato successfully applied for funding from the Health Research Council to do a qualitative research project in the area of ‘pathways to wellness’. The Mental Health Narratives Project set out to gather forty narratives of mental ill health, recovery and life after recovery by interviewing Maori and non-Maori women and men who once had a disabling mental health problem. We aimed to describe journeys to mental health, identify key themes in accounts of the recovery process and describe the impact of the experience of mental ill health on life after recovery

The Medical Policing of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Adults

This research aims to better understand the discriminatory health care experiences of transgender and gender nonconforming adults. Conducted through a non-positivist sociological methodology, a primary objective of this research is to uplift transgender and other gender nonconforming voices through a study of lived, personal health narratives. In open-forum, semi-structured interviews, eight participants were asked questions relating to their health narratives, including questions concerning health care experiences and any encounters with discriminatory behaviors/actions by medical professionals and/or other medical affiliated personnel (i.e., receptionists, community health advisors, pharmacists, etc.). Potential questions ranged in theme (but were not limited to): gender identity, gender expression, insurance, health care experiences, medical transition, medical providers, institutions, and social support. Results show five major findings among participants: Anticipated Incompetency/Discrimination, Healthcare Avoidance, Community Healing, Medicalizing Trans Identity, and Critical Care. The results of this study illuminate the reality of discrimination and transphobia experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming adults within the medical realm and encourages social movement towards amelioration of such injustice

AD-AutoGPT: An Autonomous GPT for Alzheimer's Disease Infodemiology

In this pioneering study, inspired by AutoGPT, the state-of-the-art open-source application based on the GPT-4 large language model, we develop a novel tool called AD-AutoGPT which can conduct data collection, processing, and analysis about complex health narratives of Alzheimer's Disease in an autonomous manner via users' textual prompts. We collated comprehensive data from a variety of news sources, including the Alzheimer's Association, BBC, Mayo Clinic, and the National Institute on Aging since June 2022, leading to the autonomous execution of robust trend analyses, intertopic distance maps visualization, and identification of salient terms pertinent to Alzheimer's Disease. This approach has yielded not only a quantifiable metric of relevant discourse but also valuable insights into public focus on Alzheimer's Disease. This application of AD-AutoGPT in public health signifies the transformative potential of AI in facilitating a data-rich understanding of complex health narratives like Alzheimer's Disease in an autonomous manner, setting the groundwork for future AI-driven investigations in global health landscapes.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

Flashback

Inspired by graphic health narratives—or comics as some scholars may define them—my painting “Flashback” shares my experience of recalling a traumatic incident. My aim for this painting was to evoke a visceral reaction of discomfort (particularly with the sharp objects in the character’s eyes) so that viewers may feel some semblance of what I had felt. Flashback was exhibited at the Surgical Humanities Day at the University of Saskatchewan in September 2019

Passage to Rights: Rethinking Indigenous People’s Drinking Practices in Taiwan

This thesis aims to explicate the meaning of indigenous people’s drinking practices and their relation to indigenous people’s contemporary living situations in settler-colonial Taiwan. ‘Problematic’ alcohol use has been co-opted into the diagnostic categories of mental disorders; meanwhile, the perception that indigenous people have a high prevalence of drinking nowadays means that government agencies continue to make efforts to reduce such ‘problems’. Indigenous people in Taiwan still face continuous marginalisation and systemic discrimination which render drinking a prominent issue. However, interventions based on public health narratives lack efficacy due to discordant understandings of illness, moral experience and perceptions of culture. Based on 12 months of multi-sited research in Taiwan, my study finds indigenous drinking cultures have been both generated and reshaped by their life situations, both historically and contemporarily. Drinking practices today reveal suffering under structural violence but also show resistance emerging from social change. Drinking is also practised at the interstices of contested values that make health narratives invalid. An ever-reproducing drinking culture shows a gesture of self-fashioning under multiple sufferings, as well as strategies to restore livelihoods. In the time to pursue transitional justice, indigenous people’s symbolic sobriety unfolds through resistance against current governmentality over drinking in one sense, but fighting for autonomy in another. Therefore, drinking can be understood as a ‘passage to rites/rights’ that represents the struggle of indigenous people in search of traditional values and future respect

Reconnecting whānau: Pathways to recovery for Māori with bipolar disorder

While Māori are known to experience a higher burden of mental health and addiction problems compared to non-Māori (Baxter, 2008), little exploratory research has been conducted into Māori experiences of bipolar affective disorder. Bipolar disorder is at times regarded as a “life sentence”, with little hope of recovery. The recovery- focused mental health literature, however, argues wellness is achievable for even the most intractable conditions (Lapsley, Nikora, & Black, 2002; Mental Health Commission, 2001). The aim of this research was to gather information about the experiences of Māori who were diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Interviews were conducted with 22 Māori wāhine (women) and tāne (men), and using thematic analyses, themes relevant to their life stories were uncovered. This research sought to contribute to the realisation of Māori potential by explicitly shifting from deficit- focused frameworks to a focus on systemic factors that influenced Māori wellbeing. Highlights were that whānau (participants) who were connected with friends, partners and family were motivated to achieve wellness and to stay well