Social poetics as research and practice: living in and learning from the process of research

Abstract

This paper is both a report of research work carried out by one author of the paper with the other involved in a supervisory role, and a reflection on methodology that was an emergent property of the research process. The research question arose when professional preunderstandings about schizophrenia as a biological disturbance were bracketed as a Husserlian form of phenomenology was adopted. The initial study focused on the meanings three individuals attached to being diagnosed with a mental illness and being involved in psychiatric treatment systems. The exploration of meanings led to the researcher being guided by one study participant in relation to a suitable framework for making sense of her lived experience of being entangled in psychiatric systems. This involved an appreciation of the poetics of interpersonal interaction that was simultaneously fuelled by the researcher's reading of social poetics in psychology. Thus, the research became a hermeneutic inquiry, focused upon the text of one participant (Beth)1 and the psychiatric system that she and colleagues encountered. Beth's psychiatric predicament was described by a loss of 'self', psychiatric interrogation, and positive and negative features of immersion in the system. A byproduct of taking a poetic approach was that the participant found the research process therapeutic. Thus, social poetics encouraged a beneficial blurring of the boundaries between research and practice. In both arenas, social poetics can lead to a different level of understanding. This is contradictory to mainstream approaches to research that value objectivity with a strict division between the researcher and the subjects, with the aim of producing scientific knowledge.

Embodiment of Severe and Enduring Mental Illness: Finding Meaning in Schizophrenia

“…Schizophrenia is described as biochemical imbalances in neurotransmitters, manifested as disruptions to thoughts, perceptions, or behaviours, yet this discounts the extent to which mental illnesses are experienced as disturbances of normal bodily feelings and functions (Rudge & Morse, 2001). Aldridge and Stevenson (2001), for example, describe a person with schizophrenia whose delusions featured a belief that her body had become severely distorted, while for other sufferers the condition may present as though the body is acting of its own accord, not under conscious control (Hensley, 2002;Usher, 2001). …”

“…There is a loss of self because the body no longer acts in the familiar, trusted ways. Sufferers become an "other" to the self they knew previously, an event that is both bewildering and frightening (Aldridge & Stevenson, 2001;Rudge & Morse, 2001;Usher, 2001). This is often accompanied by hopelessness and grief for the normal life that is lost, and future plans that will never materialise (Hensley, 2002;Horowitz, 2002).…”

Community-Based Healthcare

“…By observing and highlighting the poetics of everyday speech within human interaction, researchers create rather than discover new understandings of human experience and interaction (Aldridge & Stevenson, 2001). The use of poetics within the data analysis and presentation of findings in this project allowed access to unexpected and hidden thoughts, feelings and meanings from a particular participant's point of view.…”

Practical inquiry/theory in nursing

“…In 1998, a MSc student (Dee Aldridge) I was supervising decided to conduct a small‐scale research study that would describe the experience of being in schizophrenia (Aldridge 1998). A full account of the study is found in Aldridge and Stevenson (2001). She chose a phenomenological approach, appropriate to the research question.…”