Stories Of Pain Research Articles

Finding Meaning in Politics: When Victims Become Activists

Victimization is often associated with increased political participation, and victims are influential political actors in many countries around the world. Yet for victims, activism is costly: they tell and re-tell painful stories, face searing criticism, and work to exhaustion—all at one of the worst moments of their lives. So why do they do it? Based on ethnographic research with Families for Safe Streets, a group of victims-turned-activists in New York City, this article advances a new explanation for victims’ participation in politics. I propose that for some victims, meaning-making is an in-process benefit of activism. My inductive research suggests three ways victims find meaning in politics. First, through their activism, victims can re-conceptualize the losses and harms they have suffered as policy problems, rather than random, inexplicable events. Victims may also seek to help others by changing laws to prevent similar tragedies from recurring, and some victims see their activism as a way of fulfilling important obligations to their communities, their families, and their deceased relatives.

The Role of Education in Dalits’ Empowerment in the Novel ‘My Father Baliah’

Totaling Literature in general mirrors the life of humans. Dalit literature glasses social justice which has not been attainable for Dalits for ages. It is an art by the heart not to entertain, it is to empower them. To empower, education is the only tool to access everything they lost for many centuries. As per the constitution, India is a democratic country but there is no equality in the practical society. In the twenty-first century caste inequalities prevail in so many both politically and socially. Generation changes but caste does not. Reformers and revolutionaries would come, and caste would act as a dead snake. The novel expresses the importance of education scrupulously. Author and protagonist Sathyanarayana fruitfully pinioned the painful story that centralized the theme on education, and how that makes the oppressed into the national builders. Education is the only tool to empower and that makes a rationalist protest against inequalities. First, it changes the person and then the society would change when educators contribute their knowledge to break the inhumanity followed by caste. That is the only aim leaders always insist on getting an education not to make violence. This paper focuses on, Dalit Education which primarily moulds a person as a self-determined individual who can easily acquire everything, they lost in the name of Sadhana dharma. During the colonial period; Dalits got a prospect for education and a good living. This paper has concentrated on real-life facts and contemporary issues that happened in society. Education is an ocean, to reach the destination, Indian leaders functioned as the river and navigated Dalits to reach the ocean.

“The Truth Hurts But Silence Kills”: Restitutio ad Integrum and Scriptotherapy in Mario d’Offizi’s Autobiography Bless Me Father

Bless Me Father, the autobiography of South African-Italian poet Mario d’Offizi, enriches the spectrum of masculinities presented in South African white male poets’ autobiographies. It narrates the story of a “marginal” white man growing up under apartheid, and provides an innovative testimony within the rich autobiographical tradition of South Africa. The focus in this article is placed on traumatic episodes in the author’s past and on the relationship with a predatory father figure. The conflict between the choice to remain silent about hurtful events and the desire to expose them is the central dialectic of psychological trauma, and scriptotherapy is the medium used by d’Offizi to grapple with his haunting past and seek healing. Bless Me Father, this article argues, is a story of pain, loss, survival, and triumph over adversities that occupies a distinctive space within post-apartheid South African literature.

An Episode of Your Life: Rich narrative engagement with episodic stories

This article describes a new practice map, an “Episode of Your Life”, which adapts existing narrative “… of life” practices to an episodic story from a person’s life using metaphors from film and television production. This practice map draws significantly on ideas of “peopling the room” and the Team of Life in order to scaffold safety in imagining the process of telling painful stories through the collectivising of the storytelling process. This practice map specifically does not require that the storyteller tell the story, but rather invites them to imagine how they might tell a story from their life in a way that aligns with their values, hopes and preferred storylines. Some of the significant effects that we discovered were related to the richness of the visual metaphor for adding another layer of possible meaning-making in the storytelling process, and allowing for a “proliferation of what’s possible” in the imagining of the storytelling, such as through the use of time jumps; computer-generated imagery; inviting rich descriptions of preferred relationships, histories and values; and dignifying of stories that otherwise might be left unspoken. Participants were left with a feeling of solidarity and a “safe riverbank” from which to imagine telling their stories.

Developing an Artistic Approach to Ethnographic Research

This paper argues that an artistic approach can enhance the power of ethnographic research by slowing down reasoning, processing emotions and complying with the ethics of representation. The author reflects on her experiences during fieldwork in Norway among minoritized Norwegians working in the art and cultural sector, and the intense emotions and bodily reactions she experienced while listening to painful stories of trauma. She describes how this emotional intensity led her to start drawing images, and later to create a traveling exhibition.

Antígonas Tribunal de Mujeres: archivos y repertorios poéticos de la memoria de una nación en guerra y transformación

ABSTRACT Antígonas Tribunal de Mujeres: archives and poetic repertoires of the memory of a nation in war and transformation – This article analyzes from a perspective of research in political performance, the process of creation and production of the play Antígonas Tribunal de Mujeres, composed of victims and survivors of the war in Colombia, who share in common have suffered state crimes. Taking this case as the object of study, it investigates the methodological routes of creation that these women have created to transform their own stories of pain and resistance into archives and poetic repertoires. Which we postulate as forms of production and transmission of incorporated knowledge, about the memory of a nation marked by violence.

Domestication Western-Style: Fantasies of Harmony and the Violence of Plasticity in Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka

ABSTRACT Historically, animal characters and animal-child encounters in children’s narratives have served largely metaphorical functions. More recently, scholars have become interested in exploring literary human-animal relations as interesting in and of themselves and not purely as background for promoting values and attitudes considered desirable for adolescent readers. The article proposes a reading of Mary O’Hara’s novel My Friend Flicka (O’Hara 1941) which embeds the relationship between the human protagonist and the horse in the wider stories of equine domestication and the settling of the Western frontier. In effect, while the story of Ken and Flicka is read as a metaphor – a synecdoche even – it is not a metaphor of human-human encounters but of the contradictions and ethical dilemmas inherent to the process of human-directed animal domestication in a capitalist settler colonial society. Ken’s coming of age through the story of love and loss is representative of dilemmas that humans engaged in processes of domestication have had to grapple with: Ken must come to terms with the violence of domestication. Concurrently, Flicka’s story of pain, fear, and love is read not just as the unique story of an individual horse but of the generations of equines that have been forced to adapt to an environment shaped by human dominance.

Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain.

Storytelling is good for us-or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact-amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others-and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.

Plato’s Academy and the “Roman Market”: A Case Study in “Humanities Education” During Times of Crisis or Recession

The innovative (and sometimes painful) story of Athens’ self-transformation from a self-defined and self-confident independent city-state to a culture-market and service economy that discovered it could thrive best by selling its heritage to others is one I have written on in the past from a number of angles. To the elite of Athens, both community leaders and leaders in the city’s culture, the most poignant stories may have been those of the city’s schools, in particular the school that defined (for traditionalists who were not themselves philosophers) what “Athenian philosophy” meant: the Academy, the school of Plato. I should like in this short study to follow the leaders, the ‘scholarchs’ of that school – all of them ‘working philosophers’ as well as what we would call administrators – who successfully adapted it to survive through, and draw on the clientele of, the last three generations or so of the Roman Republic. I should like to see if these behaviors and characters – and they, while they do not always fit what we expect from a classical philosopher, make more sense if understood by the school’s ‘driving clientele,’ and finally what sort of story this adds up to.

Women's autonomy for managing labour pain in a relational context: An interpretive description study.

To describe how women perceived relational autonomy for decision-making during childbirth pain and illuminate influencing factors. Most women report challenging pain during birth. Circumstances can affect their ability to engage in pain management decisions. We used an interpretative description approach to conduct this study. A purposive sample of ten women who reported pain during childbirth participated in semi-structured interviews. The study was conducted between July 2019 and November 2020 and reported according to the COREQ checklist. Circumstances during childbirth, such as women's expectations and relationships, influenced their efforts to engage in relational autonomy. Care providers dealt with the unpredictability of childbirth and challenges with pain management using decision-making practices that could disrupt women's expectations, undermine women's trust, demonstrate disrespect for women and rely on inadequate communication. Women who felt dependent on others were less likely to participate in decision-making. When care providers' perceptions about pain differed from women's reports of pain, participants became distressed because care providers did not acknowledge their subjective pain experiences. Women regarded their relationships and communication with care providers as foundational to relational autonomy in decision-making about pain management during childbirth. Study findings can support care providers' considerations of the complexity of childbirth pain and factors affecting women's relational autonomy in decision-making about pain. In particular, the findings highlight the importance of women's expectations and care providers' recognition of women's experiences of pain. Women who shared their stories of childbirth pain contributed to the data collected. The chief nursing officers in the data collection setting facilitated the recruitment and data collection.

Facets of human conditions: Some artistic records and ethnotheatrical interpretations of ex-gambling addicts

This article aims to display an ethnodrama playscript with the story of a gambling husband coping with his financial struggle and his family’s emotional reactions. The researcher was involved as collaborating playwright in the project, assisting a devising director who led a group of ex-gambling addicts and their family members referred by a Hong Kong counselling service. The ethnotheatre generated, interpreted and mediated data from interviews and devising sessions, and exhibited a painful story about the downfall of a taxi driver who earned easy money by betting and ended up in heavy debt, having to resort to begging his wife for money. The article also includes a discussion on reality and truth, as interpretation perspectives in arts-based research.

Experiences of Assyrian refugee women seeking care for chronic pain: a qualitative study

BackgroundRefugee women exhibit some of the highest rates of chronic pain yet the diversity and challenges of health care systems across countries pose numerous challenges for refugee women trying to access quality health care.ObjectiveWe sought to explore the experiences of Assyrian refugee women seeking care for chronic pain.MethodsSemi-structured interviews (face-to-face and virtual) were undertaken with 10 Assyrian women of refugee background living in Melbourne, Australia. Audio recordings and field notes of interviews were collected and themes were identified using a phenomenological approach. Women were required to be conversant in English or Arabic and willing to use a translator if necessary.ResultsWe identified five major themes of women’s experiences accessing care for chronic pain: (1) the story of pain; (2) the experience of help seeking in Australia and home country; (3) factors shaping the ability to access appropriate care; (4) support seeking systems; and (5) influence of culture and gender roles.ConclusionExploring refugee women’s experience of seeking care for chronic pain reinforces the need to explore hard to reach population’s perspectives in research and helps to understand how vectors of disadvantage may intersect. For successful integration into health care systems of host countries, particularly for complex conditions such as chronic pain, there is a need to work with women community members to develop programs that are culturally aligned to enhance access pathways to care.

Using Social Media to Discuss Chronic Pain: A Descriptive Study of TikTok Content

Background Approximately 20% of individuals worldwide are affected by chronic pain, a condition defined by WHO as lasting more than 3 months. Although chronic pain is more prevalent in adults 65 years and older, it affects individuals of all ages. An estimated one-quarter to one-third of children experience chronic pain. Materials and methods One-hundred TikTok videos discussing chronic pain were analyzed using quantitative content analysis and descriptive statistics. Content categories were pre-determined based on CDC guidelines for prescribing practices for chronic pain and literature review. Data was recorded, managed, and analyzed using Microsoft Excel. Results Collectively, the 100 sampled videos received 99,133,350 views; 13,817,400 likes; 167,473 comments; and 310,301 shares. Five content categories were present in a majority of the videos: 81 videos were created by patients and 81 by perceived young adults (age 19–30), 58 mentioned a type of chronic pain, and 55 used music. Additionally, 78 videos did not recommend solutions for chronic pain. Discussion Young people are using social media platforms, such as TikTok, to discuss their personal experiences with chronic pain. Our study found that these videos were primarily ways for young adults to share personal stories of chronic pain, not to promote remedies. Understanding the content created by people suffering from inadequately treated conditions, like chronic pain, is important for those involved in caring for such patients.

Jobless Growth: A Painful Story of Employment Generation in India

Jobless Growth: A Painful Story of Employment Generation in India

The mechanisms of influence in intergenerational trauma transmission from mother to baby after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina: what have we learned since then?

IntroductionAfter the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that lasted from 1992 to 1995, the populations gradually rebuilt their lives haunted by the spectrum of personal and collective painful souvenirs. Regarding the children who were born after the war, some mothers would rather not talk about it to protect their children from what they might be feeling while others would definetely share what they have experienced to protect their children. Because the intergenerational transmission of war trauma from mother to baby has been poorly explored among populations who recently lived in a warzone, we seeked to highlight the particularity of the interpersonal relations between the mother and her child in connection with maternal psychotrauma, by searching the factors of influence on the functioning of the dyad.ObjectivesThe main objective of this study is to determine and conceptualize the modes of transmission of trauma from the study of mother-baby interactions in a Bosnian environment, after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.MethodsIn 2003, 40 mothers and their babies aged 2 to 36 months living in Sarajevo were enrolled in the study. Among these mothers, 31 lived in or near the warzone and 9 were either displaced in other areas of the country or were refugees in foreign countries. We assessed the level of severity of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (Blake et al, 1998). In order to examine the quality of the mother-child dyads of mothers who lived through the war, we videorecorded a 10-minute free play of 23 dyads in their home environment. Then the interactions were coded using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development observation grid by two independent raters.ResultsThe results showed that all mothers who lived through the war presented post-traumatic symptoms but only half of them showed a PTSD. Videotaped observations of mother-child interactions during playtimes revealed that their interactions are less linked to the mother’s PTSD than to the influence of PTSD on maternal attitudes and thereby extending to those of their infant. They are less sensitive to their children’s signals. They are also more intrusive and detached. Overall, they are more focused on themselves than on their child when they are interacting. As a result, their children are more focused on play and less actively engaged in communicating with their mothers.ConclusionsThe interactions between the mother and her child cover a set of relatively complex processes during which the two partners influence each other. When a mother lives through the war, she will pass on to her child an often painful life story. And thus, it is not only the content but also the way she transmits it that influences how the child receives the objects of the transmission.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

The Many Faces of Josefa Jaramillo: (Mis)identifications and Historical Longing in the Colonial Present

Abstract Before 1970, the public had never seen a picture of Josefa Jaramillo, the Taoseña who married frontiersman Kit Carson in 1843 and stayed with him until they both died in 1868. Then, within six months, two such images crossed the portal of the Carson museum in Taos, each from a different donor. For fifty years since, historians, curators, and descendants have embraced the photos as authentic. But they are not pictures of the same person and it is possible that neither of them is an image of Jaramillo. The provenance of the pictures tells the story of a New Mexico still in the grip of colonialisms that had been unfolding for centuries, producing by 1970 a place that often ranked with southern states at the bottom of lists measuring economic and social well-being. It tells the story of a state that did not yet acknowledge what it had in common with the South: a history of slavery. It tells a story of women deemed indistinguishable from and interchangeable with one another. It tells a story of generational pain rooted in the trauma of continental empire. It tells a story of the desire for history, for connection and belonging. It tells a story of mistaken identification.

Narrating pain: The power of storytelling in Maryam Madjidi’sMarx et la poupée

AbstractThis article explores the positioning of the immigrant self in the story-world by elaborating on the unsettling experience of migration and analyzing the discursive (re)construction of identity in the novelMarx et la poupée[Marx and the Doll] by Franco-Iranian writer Maryam Madjidi. In order to reconstruct her dissolved self, the protagonist and narrator tells her story of pain and suffering caused by alienation and the struggle between two conflicting identities, the Persian and the French. Through the act of storytelling, this article argues, immigrant suffering is translated into narrative. The theoretical framework explores translation as a narrative tool and also reflects on how the act of storytelling grants the immigrant subject agency and invites readers to engage with their painful experience. The first part of the analysis examines the protagonist’s suffering by focusing on her refusal to eat and loss of language. The second part analyses how she recreates her painful experiences by inventing tales and presenting events and memories in a dreamlike fashion, while also critically addressing her encounters with the new culture. The stories allow for a reflection on and a possible reconciliation of the two conflicting identities and invite the readers to become aware of the complexity of the immigrant’s suffering.

Kwon Yoon-Duck: Illustrator–Republic of Korea

Abstract: "Even in a painful story, I look deeper into the system and the background behind it, and ask questions, and I find hope and goodwill in the end."

Social Exclusion: A Subaltern Perspective in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Postcolonial Indian society appears to have achieved political freedom but has yet to get social freedom. The modern, democratic Indian society is not yet free as for as the caste system, the unequal distribution of wealth, the safety and security of women, minorities and children, and so on are concerned. The term social exclusion or social marginalisation means ostracization or alienation of an individual or a community as a whole on the base of wealth, social status, caste, class, religion, gender etc. This paper offers a critique of Arundhati Roy’s second published novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in 2017 to understand the integration of the theme of social exclusion and subalternation in the novel. The novel is fundamentally a painful story of everyone and everything oppressed and suppressed and drifting to the margins of society by the powerful class. The narrative is dedicated to ‘The Unconsoled’ such as the Hijras, the outcasts, women, the Kashmiris, the disappeared, the displaced so on and so forth. The novel transports us on a journey that spans many years, from the claustrophobic Old Delhi neighbourhoods to the escalating new metropolis and beyond, to the Kashmir Valley and the forests of central India, where war is concord and concord is war, and where, occasionally, normality is avowed.

239 VASOSPASTIC ANGINA: A CASE OF COMPLETE FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT

Abstract Introduction Vasospastic angina is defined as a focal or diffuse spasm of the arterial wall of an epicardial coronary artery due to muscle cells hyperreactivity caused by an increased calcium sensitivity. Clinical presentation typically consists in chronic story of rest and/or effort typical chest pain, episodes of ST elevated or not ST elevated myocardial infarction, arrhythmias or cardiac arrest; an increased vagal tone, drugs, allergic reactions or the exposure to extreme cold also can trigger vasospasm. Clinical case 73 years old dyslipidemic woman; in past medical history thyroidectomy and radiotherapy for carcinoma and right quadrantectomy with radiotherapy and hormonal therapy for breast cancer. In 2017 admission to cath-lab for non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) with the evidence of mild left coronary artery disease without critical obstructive stenosis (MINOCA). For the persisting of effort angina and dyspnea (NYHA and CCS II-III), started Diltiazem therapy (60 mg x3) with clinical benefit. In 2020, due to the onset of new episodes of angina, started Ranolazine therapy. In June 2022, for the worsening of clinical symptoms, was evaluated with a Coronary CT, that showed a 65% stenosis at right coronary-acute marginal bifurcation and mild disease on left coronary artery, and then was admitted for an elective coronary angiography, with no evidence of epicardial artery critical stenosis. At the functional evaluation FFR, CFR and IMR (>0.80, 2.5 and 18) demonstrated normal coronary flow reserve and good microcirculation function. For the suspicion of vasospastic angina, acetylcholine test was performed with the evidence of mid-distal left anterior descending artery total occlusion, angina onset and ECG changes, promptly regressed with nitrates administration (Figure 1). Patient was discharged with the optimization of medical therapy with Diltiazem 120 mg x3, with clinical benefit. Conclusions To date vasospastic angina remains underdiagnosed. Functional evaluation of coronary arteries plays a fundamental role in the diagnostic algorithm of the disease and should always be investigated in case of patients with typical symptoms and the absence of critical epicardial stenosis. Further investigations are required to better explain pathogenesis and to identify affected patients in shorter times to ensure early optimized medical therapy.