First-Person Accounts Research Articles

In Their Own Voices: A Critical Narrative Review of Black Women Faculty Members’ First-Person Accounts of Racial Trauma Across Higher Education

Phenomenon : Black women often face more challenges in academic medicine than others and are leaving the profession due to unsupportive work environments, systematic neglect, and experiences of invisibility. Research offers insight into Black women faculty experiences, but studies have largely been conducted on their experiences rather than written by them. We analyzed first-person narratives exploring Black women faculty members’ experiences with racial trauma across the academy considering the intersectionality of racism and sexism to lay the foundation for understanding Black women physicians’ faculty experiences in similar spaces. Approach : We gathered first-person narratives of Black women faculty members in the U.S. from ERIC, Web of Science, and Ovid Medline. We used a variety of terms to draw out potential experiences with trauma (e.g., microaggressions, stigma, prejudice). Articles were screened by two researchers, with a third resolving conflicts. Drawing on constructs from Black feminist theory, two researchers extracted from each article authors’ claims about: (a) their institutions, (b) their experiences in those spaces, and (c) suggestions for change. We then analyzed these data through the lens of racial trauma while also noting the effects of gendered racism. Findings : We identified four key themes from the 46 first-person accounts of racial trauma of Black faculty members in higher education: pressures arising from being “the only” or “one of few”; elimination of value through the “cloak of invisibility” and “unconscious assumptions”; the psychological burden of “walking a tightrope”; and communal responsibility, asking “if not us, then who?” Insights : Black women’s narratives are necessary to unearth their specific truths as individuals who experience intersectional oppression because of their marginalized racial and gender identities. This may also assist with better understanding opportunities to dismantle the oppressive structures and practices hindering more diverse, equitable, and inclusive institutional environments where their representation, voice, and experience gives space for them to thrive and not simply survive within the academy, including and not limited to medicine.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Access: Insights from First-Person Accounts in a Safety-Net Health Care System

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected populations that were already facing socioeconomic disadvantages and limited access to health care services. The livelihood of millions was further compromised when strict shelter-in-place measures forced them out of their jobs. The way that individuals accessed food during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed as a result of declines in household income, food chain supply disruptions, and social distance measures. This qualitative study examined the food access experiences of participants enrolled in a safety-net health care system-based, free, monthly fruit and vegetable market in the Metro Boston area during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings offer rich qualitative information to understand the financial repercussions of the pandemic on food access.

"Ngany Kamam, I Speak Truly": First-Person Accounts of Aboriginal Youth Voices in Mental Health Service Reform.

Aboriginal young people are experts in their own experience and are best placed to identify the solutions to their mental health and wellbeing needs. Given that Aboriginal young people experience high rates of mental health concerns and are less likely than non-Indigenous young people to access mental health services, co-design and evaluation of appropriate mental health care is a priority. Increasing Aboriginal young people's participation in mental health service reform is key to ensuring services are culturally secure, relevant and accessible. This paper presents first-person accounts from three Aboriginal young people who worked alongside their Elders and in a positive and constructive partnership with mainstream mental health services on a three-year participatory action research project in Perth, Western Australia, in Whadjuk Nyoongar boodja (Country). The young people recount their experiences as participants and co-researchers on a systems change mental health research project and share their views on the importance of privileging Aboriginal youth voices. Their accounts highlight that Aboriginal young people's participation and leadership must be understood through a decolonising lens and that working in genuine partnership with the community is key to increasing their contact and engagement with mental health care and improving mental health and wellbeing outcomes.

Legible, visible, conspicuous: disabled ingenuity and “ability accommodations” in the disability memoir


 
 
 First-person accounts of disability and chronic illness have been foundational to the development of disability studies and disability activism. The production of the literary disability memoir places certain rhetorical demands on its author, requiring the memoirist to “translate” their unique experiences as a disabled subject into language the nondisabled reader is equipped to understand. Using key concepts from disabled writers Eli Clare and Neil Marcus, the essay evaluates the disability memoir as a piece of assistive technology produced not for disabled people, but by disabled writers for the benefit of the reader whose embodied experience of disability and chronic illness is limited. These “accessibility accommodations” serve to mitigate the effects of experiential limitation in order to facilitate nondisabled readers’ engagement with disabled ways of being and knowing. The essay offers an overview of rhetorical strategies disabled memoirists use to make their narratives accessible, and surveys examples of literary memoir from authors writing from and through different mental, neurological, and physical conditions. I argue that adapting a first-person account of disability for the page results in a necessary, unavoidable disembodiment of the author’s story; this disembodiment is not a failure of the author to represent their lives fully and accurately, but rather an ingenious innovation on the part of disabled, chronically ill, terminally ill, and neurodivergent writers. As assistive technology, the disability memoir subverts of the typical disabled-nondisabled power dynamic, placing the nondisabled reader on the receiving end of the disabled author’s accommodations.
 
 

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Construing journeys to recovery from psychosis: Aqualitative analysis of first-person accounts.

To perform a qualitative analysis of the factors that were construed as salient in facilitating the process of recovery in the narratives of people with psychosis who had their first-person accounts (FPAs) published in an academic journal. Computerized textual analysis was undertaken of 156 FPAs written by persons who had experienced psychosis and published in the Schizophrenia Bulletin between 1979 and 2020. Constructs were extracted from the FPAs and coded in terms of Mental health treatment and therapy, Self-management and Multiple factors; recovery processes (Connectedness, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment), Struggles and Turning points. Psychosis impacted on individuals in profound and diverse ways. This was reflected in the different pathways to recovery included in the FPAs. Underlying the different pathways was the salience of re-engagement in the shared reality of others; development of a cohesive and positive self; empowerment through the use of self-management strategies, and making sense of experience through reconstruing what was meaningful. Personal constructs identified in the FPAs provided insight into both challenges faced and alternative avenues of movement that were perceived as available. Processes that support individuals re-engaging with the shared reality of others are central to recovery. Supportive relationships and fostering open dialogue were consistent themes across the different pathways that recovery journeys took. Establishing a meaningful lifestyle and recovering a positive sense of identity were a key challenge following psychosis onset. Appreciation of experiences contained in FPAs has the potential to enhance the effectiveness and humanity of mental health care.

Healing the homelessness, fixing a broken aid industry, and challenging the status quo: perspectives of a physician-activist

ABSTRACT Homelessness is among the most important problems in social medicine. While traditional studies provide useful answers (albeit for increasingly narrow phenomena), unique perspectives and first-person accounts hold potential to influence broader thinking about the field. Here, we provide a first-person account from physician-activist David Buck, a health policy expert and founder of Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston, on what it takes to tackle the homelessness epidemic, fix the broken aid industry, and challenge the status quo.

"Being a team of five strong women… we had to make an impression:" The College Math Academy as an intervention into mathematics education.

This paper, a first-person account, describes a community psychology-aligned intervention into a precalculus mathematics class at an Hispanic Serving Research Institution. The intervention was designed because the standard precalculus mathematics class had a high failure rate, especially for Latinx students, which was serving as a barrier for declaration of a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics major. The high failure rate indicates a structural problem that requires a structural intervention. The paper is coauthored with the teaching team, undergraduates who had taken the course, a graduate student who evaluated the class, and a community psychologist. We describe the ways that the new course, the College Math Academy, transformed the social environment through capacity building, providing access to valued resources for historically marginalized groups, facilitating opportunities to critique dominant power structures, prioritizing perspectives and experiences of people of color, and promoting understanding of how various social forces shape culture and values. The course also decentered white educational norms via adapting decoloniality and liberatory practices. In turn, each person describes their experience of the course. We draw on the first-person accounts to show how they illustrate a transformative, decolonial, and liberatory social environment. We end with implications for how community psychologists can work in their universities to support structural change.

Contemplative Training and Psychological Stress: an Analysis of First-person Accounts

ObjectivesSeveral studies have investigated the relationship between contemplative approaches and psychobiological stress response; however, this area of research is still new, the mechanisms of the relationship between the stress response attenuation and contemplative training have not been fully delineated, and little is known about the effects of contemplative practice on the ways psychological stress is experienced. This study aimed to explore the first-person experience of psychological stress in meditation practitioners.MethodsWe conducted short semi-structured interviews with twenty-five meditation practitioners and twenty meditation-naïve controls immediately after they had undergone a laboratory task (the Trier Social Stress Test). A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the interviews. Thematic analysis was combined with descriptive statistics of the qualitative information that had been converted to quantitative data.ResultsExperiences instantiating main themes were identified as follows: (1) primary experiences encountered, describing the most salient experiences associated with the task; (2) reasons for stress, delineating the analyses of why the task was stressful; (3) affect, dealing with emotional experiences during the task; (4) emotion regulation; and (5) attention allocation describing regulatory strategies employed by the participants. Responses to subjective stress experience in meditation practitioners included use of humor, presence of positive affect, combinations of different types of emotion regulation strategies, and adaptive attention allocation.ConclusionsThis study elucidates particularities of meditators’ subjective experience of psychological stress, provides new insights on the mechanisms of meditation effect on the stress response, and proposes new directions for research.

First-Person Accounts of Change Among Young Adults Enrolled in Coordinated Specialty Care for First-Episode Psychosis.

This study investigated how clients of a coordinated specialty care (CSC) program for first-episode psychosis perceived how they changed while attending the program, what the most important changes were, and what mechanisms they believed helped bring about these changes. Study participants were 121 individuals (71 men and 50 women) from 35 CSC programs across 22 U.S. states. Responses to the primary questions of interest were procured through a semistructured interview. Data on the length of time in the CSC program were also obtained. The authors used systematic content analyses to analyze these qualitative data. Participants reported a greater number of changes the longer they had received CSC services. Half of the participants reported improved psychiatric symptoms, and this change was the most important for almost one-third (31%; N=32) of the sample. In addition, 39% (N=45) of participants also reported improved social and interpersonal skills, changes in their attitude to and perspective on life, and more treatment engagement. Participants most frequently endorsed therapy as the mechanism underlying their improvement. Standardized outcome measures allow systematic assessment of clinical and functional status, but they do not provide a nuanced understanding of the underlying mechanisms or the areas of improvement most important to individual clients. The findings reinforce the value of mixed methods in both research and quality improvement efforts as well as for greater integration of patient-selected outcome measures.

The body problem in the schizophrenia spectrum

Self-disturbances were central to Bleuler’s concept of schizophrenia. While explicit self-processing deficits have been reported in the schizophrenia-spectrum, phenomenological experiences of the self are poorly understood. Study 1 analyzed 82 First-Person-Accounts (FPAs), collected across three decades by coding for self/body disturbances with the Perceptual Aberration Scale. Study 2 investigated the role of self-disturbances including out-of-body experiences (OBE), in relation to social isolation and parietal functioning in the schizophrenia-spectrum. 55% of the FPAs reported anomalous self/body disturbances. Dissociative experiences were vastly increased in the schizophrenia-spectrum and were exacerbated by loneliness. Patients and high-schizotypes reported OBEs at 5 times the rate of controls. Interestingly, superior mental rotation ability was linked to a weakened sense of self. FPAs provide valuable insight into the phenomenological self-experiences. Self-disturbances, heightened by social isolation, may be central to the schizophrenia-spectrum. Lastly, the relationship between enhanced imagery and self-disturbances highlight the importance of the parietal regions in schizophrenia.

Partition of British India: Causes and Consequences Revisited

The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy Through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts. By Ishtiaq Ahmed. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012. xlvii...

First Person Accounts of Mental Illness and Recovery

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessFirst Person Accounts of Mental Illness and RecoveryJeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., , and Jeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H.Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H., Editor, and Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H.Published Online:1 Jan 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.650106AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail edited by Winston LeCroyCraig and HolschuhJane; Hoboken, New Jersey, John Wiley and Sons, 2012, 480 pagesThe book First Person Accounts of Mental Illness and Recovery is an edited text of 60 accounts and another in a growing list of such books. To be worth the effort such a book must blaze new ground. Unfortunately, this tome does not.Collections of first-person accounts have been edited chronologically, such as Peterson’s A Mad People’s History of Madness (1); by theme, such as Geller and Harris’ Women of the Asylum (2); and by diagnosis, such as Landis and Mettler’s Varieties of Psychopathological Experience (3). LeCroy and Holschuh follow the diagnostic organizational scheme.Two-thirds of the accounts are by women. Most were previously published; of the seven accounts of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, all were published in Schizophrenia Bulletin between 2000 and 2011; five of the eight accounts of depression and bipolar disorder were published before; none of the accounts of cognitive disorders, somatoform disorders, dissociative disorders, sexual and gender identity disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are original. The sections on posttraumatic stress disorder and eating disorders contain all-original contributions.What is most unusual about this collection, and a feature not pointed out by the editors, is that it is a book of predominantly middle-class, well-educated writers. Twenty-three authors have a college degree; 13 are in or have graduated from a degree program beyond college. The contributors include a doctoral-level researcher, an Olympic athlete, a college chemistry professor, an attorney, a marine major, an author, a physician, a nurse, a social worker, and professors in other fields. Eight of the contributors work in the mental health field.The authors are more likely than not to come from homes with supportive parents or are parents themselves. Grandparents are frequently involved. They are more likely to have had a stay at the Betty Ford Clinic than at a state hospital, more likely to have been on a ski vacation in Europe than to be homeless.Not only are the authors a select group of individuals with mental illnesses; in focusing on recovery, the editors have mostly chosen only individuals with good insight who are well engaged in treatment and who have a message to direct to the reader. Few are just telling their own story.Certainly the folks I see in the state hospital and in the community mental health center are never in a position to say, as one author does, “Through my disorder, I have discovered a passion for neurology and psychology. I plan to go to medical school after college and become double-certified in neurology and psychiatry.”There are many compilations of first-person accounts far more useful than this one. Many of these can be obtained used or online, for a fraction of the cost of this book. For whatever purpose you might use a collection of first-person accounts, seek out some of the books published well before First Person Accounts of Mental Illness and Recovery.Dr. Geller, who is the book review editor, is facility medical director, Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital, and professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester.The reviewer reports no competing interests.References1 Peterson D: A Mad People’s History of Madness. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982Google Scholar2 Geller JL, Harris M: Women of the Asylum. New York, Doubleday, 1994Google Scholar3 Landis CMettler F (eds): Varieties of Psychopathological Experience. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 65Issue 1 January 2014Pages e04-e04 Metrics The reviewer reports no competing interests.PDF download History Published online 1 January 2014 Published in print 1 January 2014

Book Review: Ahmed, Ishtiaq, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-person Accounts

Ahmed, Ishtiaq, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-person Accounts (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2011/Oxford University Press, 2012). Pp. 759/592. Price `995/PKR 2100.

LADY YUCHI IN THE FIRST PERSON: PATRONAGE, KINSHIP, AND VOICE IN THE GUYANG CAVE

Recent research sheds new light on the importance of maternal and matrilineal kin relationships during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period. Yet accounts of women’s family lives remain rare in the historical record, and first-person accounts still rarer. The dedication of Buddhist images by women during this period provides the occasional exception to this rule. The Maitreya niche sponsored by Lady Yuchi in 495 ce in the Guyang Cave at Longmen, dedicated to her deceased son, constitutes a first-person account of her own identity and her place in her husband’s family. Despite the social eminence of her husband’s primary wife, an imperial princess, she omits the princess and her son from the family group represented in her niche. Lady Yuchi depicts instead a nuclear family group centered on herself, and privileges her own mother-son relationship over all others in commemorating her son Niujue.

“Molten Light: The Intertwined History of Steel and Photography”—The Roles of Oral Histories and Other First-Person Accounts

We usually view photographs without hearing from those pictured or from the photographers who took them. An international project, “Molten Light: The Intertwined History of Steel and Photography,” seeks to bridge this gap by integrating oral histories with a multinational photographic exhibition that explores the intertwined histories of steel and photography. The exhibition and related books and educational materials will incorporate interviews with more than thirty photographers whose images will be featured, along with interviews and other first-person accounts from steelworkers, their families, other residents of steel communities, sculptors, steel magnates, builders, and others whose lives and work have intersected with the manufacturing and use of steel around the world.

The problematic neglect of phenomenology in contemporary psychiatry

No abstract available.

“You are in a place that is out of the world. . .”: Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”

Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that “loud music” has been used in the detention camps of the United States‘ “global war on terror.” A survey of practices at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan; Camp Nama (Baghdad), Iraq; Forward Operating Base Tiger (Al-Qaim), Iraq; Mosul Air Force Base, Iraq; Guantanamo, Cuba; Camp Cropper (Baghdad), Iraq; and at the “dark prisons” from 2002 to 2006 reveals that the use of “loud music” was a standard, openly acknowledged component of “harsh interrogation.” Such music was understood to be one medium of the approach known as “futility” in both the 1992 and the 2006 editions of the US Army's field manual for interrogation. The purpose of such “futility” techniques as “loud music” and “gender coercion” is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile, yet the military establishment itself teaches techniques by which “the music program” can be resisted. The article concludes with the first-person account of a young US citizen, working in Baghdad as a contractor, who endured military detention and “the music program” for ninety-seven days in mid-2006—a man who knew how to resist.

Editorial: More Changes for the Schizophrenia Bulletin

Editorial: More Changes for the Schizophrenia Bulletin

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, and: The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale: First-Person Accounts (review)

R E V I E W NATHANIEL PHILBRICK In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex New York: Viking, 2000. 320 pages Illustrations, bibliography, index. $24.95. THOMAS NICKERSON Owen Chase, and Others: The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale: First-Person Accounts Ed. with an Introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick. New York: Penguin, 2000. 249 pages. $12.95. I n 1820, a Nantucket whaleship on a routine whaling voyage was rammed and sunk by a bull sperm whale. The twenty men on board dispersed into three whaleboats and set out for the coast of South America, over two thousand miles away. Of the twenty men, eight survived, including the captain, George Pollard, the first mate, Owen Chase, and the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson . Three were left on Henderson Island and later rescued, and the other five survived in the whaleboats by eventually resorting to eating the flesh of their dead companions. It is this harrowing tale that Nathaniel Philbrick tells in his well-researched In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Herman Melville famously used the Essex disaster as the basis for the ending of Moby-Dick (1851). Melville’s knowledge of the story came from reading the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, written by first mate Owen Chase and published a mere nine months after his rescue. In the ensuing 180 years after its publication in 1821, most of what was known about the Essex came from Chase’s Narrative. Then, around 1960, an 1876 narrative of the disaster, written late in life by the Essex’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, was found. Thomas Farel Heffernan’s excellent Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex (1981) was completed just before the discovery of the Nickerson manuscript became known. With Nickerson’s manuscript, Philbrick is able to study more thoroughly the events leading up to the whale’s ramming of the ship. Thus, Philbrick bases his account of the sinking of the Essex and the survival of eight of its crew members on the following: captain George Pollard’s account of his ordeal recorded in a letter attributed to Aaron Paddack of the whaleship Diana (written February 23, 1821, the day Pollard was rescued), A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 95 R E V I E W first mate Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821), cabin boy Thomas Nickerson’s “Desultory Sketches” (written prior to 1876, first published in an abridged version in 1984), boatsteerer Thomas Chappel’s An Account of the Loss of the Essex (a religious tract published as Pamphlet No. 579 in 1824), and other short letters and journal entries. The Essex was George Pollard’s first command, although he had spent most of the previous four years aboard the Essex as mate. Pollard’s style of command was almost democratic. As Philbrick notes: “Modern survival psychologists have determined that this ‘social’—as opposed to ‘authoritarian’— form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions must be made quickly and firmly” (100). Nantucketers approvingly called authoritarian captains “fishy men” (100). Mates, on the other hand, were to remain sensitive to the crew’s moods. “[T]he Essex,” Philbrick writes, “had ended up with a captain who had the instincts and soul of a mate, and a mate who had the ambition and fire of a captain” (101). This odd reversal of roles led to striking differences in the fate of each whaleboat’s crew. Only two of seven survived in Pollard’s boat, George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell, while three of six survived in Chase’s: Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson. All three boats resorted to cannibalism, but this occurred much later in Chase’s boat than in the others. Chase had so strictly rationed water and biscuit that starvation was held at bay much longer. Solely in Pollard’s boat did the men...