P092 Imagined Futures: How can digital storytelling empower young people with JIA to engage in ideas about health, wellbeing and transition

Abstract

Abstract Background/Aims During February half-term 2022, seven young people with JIA ranging in age from 11 to 16 coalesced at the Unicorn Theatre in London to participate in a week-long series of workshops exploring filmmaking, digital storytelling, and health. Led by Creative Health PhD researcher Anna Woolf (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), and Debbie Wilson, Young People’s Project Manager from JIA-at-NRAS, the facilitators engaged the young people in a series of digitally-led practices which allowed the young people to explore their lived experiences in a creatively-led group setting. Utilising TikTok methodologies (Pomerantz, 2021) the young people created and performed content that explored themes of identity and emerging self-hood. The project enabled young people’s understanding of their JIA to be explored in relation to their hopes and fears about their future health, self-management, and ideas about transition. Methods The approach included pre-project qualitative and quantitative surveys detailing young people’s attitudes and experiences to having JIA, semi-structured interviews with the young people and thematic qualitative analysis of filmed stories. Results Young people expressed that they had never met another young person with JIA or arthritis ever before despite several of them attending the same paediatric centres such as Great Ormond Street or the Evelina hospital in London. The project coalesced young people around their collective health conditions and the use of digital mediums made space for places of powerful solidarity between young people experiencing the same health problems. Conclusion Despite young people with JIA having good relationships generally with their doctors and support from their families, the work created by them in the project showed the researcher very clearly that they need much better peer support structures, help and understanding from other adults such as teachers, and in general, more understanding and empathy from the world at large about their lived experience. Utilising TikTok, filmmaking and online creative formats such as meme-making and online journaling, the young people were clearly engaged and adeptly expert at producing creative testimony and performance which illustrated their experiences of health. Assumptions such as believing that young people struggled with their patient-doctor relationships were replaced with a real understanding of the young people’s struggles, such as learning that teachers and other adults in the world are far more problematic, oftentimes labelling them as lazy or difficult for not participating in life in ways that their fully able-bodied peers do. The researcher also learnt much more about the effects of poor mental health that JIA engenders for young people with arthritis and reflected on the need for more creative peer-led spaces to explore this. Disclosure A. Woolf: None. D. Wilson: None.