Healthcare providers’ engagement with eating disorder recovery narratives: opening to complexity and diversity

Abstract

Interdisciplinary healthcare providers (HCPs) receive only minimal training in identifying, referring for and treating eating disorders and may feel ill-prepared to manage them. There is a need for brief interventions that prepare HCPs for work with people with eating disorders, particularly when they do not fit stereotypes about who might experience an eating disorder. One method for enacting brief interventions that make change in this realm is using digital stories (short videos) to generate awareness and knowledge. In this article, we discuss the results of a pilot study exploring the impact of viewing digital stories created by people in eating disorder recovery and their supporters on an interdisciplinary group of HCPs. We showed five stories to 22 HCPs who filled out qualitative prequestionnaires and postquestionnaires about their experiences of viewing the films and how they conceptualised recovery. Providers found the stories evocative; the stories appear to have complexified their perspectives on recovery. HCPs desired more diverse, detailed and lengthy stories, indicating that pursuing digital storytelling for HCP education and awareness may hold promise. Through centring the voices of people with eating disorders and in recovery, digital stories may also provide new ways of talking about recovery that open up possibilities for embracing difference.

Conceptualizing eating disorder recovery research: Current perspectives and future research directions

“…Additionally, the specific terminology of "recovery" may not resonate with all people experiencing life beyond an ED [55], causing some potential participants to self-select out of such studies. Some people with lived experience note that the term "recovery" is prescribed and carries preconceptions [56,57]. Indeed, there are nuances and connotations involved with the use of the word "recovery. "…”

“…Some researchers have elected to take creative approaches to research, seeking to explore recovery in different ways. Potentially, such methods enable researchers to "see" facets of recovery phenomenon that are less evident in methods that primarily hinge on either words or numbers [57]. To date, ED recovery researchers have used creative methods such as Photovoice [104,105], which aims to involve participants in the process of generating and analyzing research data [106].…”

“…Another creative method, digital storytelling [57,107], encourages participants to "story themselves" at a particular moment in time. This may enable the creation of more nuanced, rich, and person-centered depictions of recovery; the participant's voice is centered in a way that may be less feasible in research that seeks to generate patterns across several participants' accounts [107].…”

“…This may enable the creation of more nuanced, rich, and person-centered depictions of recovery; the participant's voice is centered in a way that may be less feasible in research that seeks to generate patterns across several participants' accounts [107]. Like Photovoice, digital stories can also be used to work toward enhancing understandings of recovery amongst people who do not have lived experience (e.g., healthcare providers) [57].…”

“…Other creative methods include the use of collages, verbal storytelling, drawing,and more [108][109][110]. Placing the decision about which creative method to use in the hands of research participants may also enable a redressing of traditional power dynamics in research that position the researcher as the ultimate decisionmaker [57].…”