ISCHP

Written by Megan Young

It’s early in the morning, somewhere around 4am, and I have been woken from sleep (again) by a migraine. More precisely it is a cluster headache, but this always sounds to me too gentle a label for the kind of nerve pain that accompanies it, so I call them migraines in an attempt to communicate the appropriate level of suffering.

Communicating pain with language is a notoriously difficult endeavour, fraught with miscommunication, minimisation, and in the case of women especially, disbelief.  This makes it in many ways an essentially lonely experience, and when multimorbid disease and illness mean the pain is widespread, chronic, and at times unbearably intense, the depth and breadth of this kind of loneliness can also become widespread, chronic, and unbearably intense.

This kind of loneliness was, in essence, the motivation behind my decision to create an autoethnographic arts-based Ph.D. thesis on chronic pain and illness. Though there is much research on many different aspects of both pain and illness, they remain poorly understood at the chronic experiential level because, I believe, traditional research methodologies are much better at pulling apart an experience into individual components, at labelling and categorisation, than they are at understanding and communicating complex and intersectional lived experience.

I certainly felt so when reading the current research on pain and illness as background to my thesis, unable to find a personal connection to the stripping back and stripping down of the knowledge reflected there, or to quote the poet C.K. Stead, “…where [were] the words for/the pain and the panic/the escape and the joy/the I and the thou?”. If the experience itself was isolating and lonely, this disconnect to research only magnified the alienation more.

Communicating the fullness of experience, particularly the shadowed and unspoken aspects that we either can’t find the words for, or are too ashamed or reticent to talk about, is one of the creative arts great contribution to human knowledge. In my own research, I found art was a way I could condense chaos and complication into a painting or a poem, a way to share chaos and complication through a painting or a poem.

Every piece of artwork I included was created from layers of painting and photographs and medical illustrations that I made and collected during the years I wrote the main body of my Ph.D. thesis. I then collaged these disparate elements together and painted over them to form a cohesive whole, to turn fragments of moments into timescaped narratives of life and loss and pain and “quotidian grief”. A similar process was used for the accompanying poetry: words and phrases gathered from personal notes made, diagnostic reports given, medical texts collected, cut out and put back together into a small snapshot of a larger meaning.

There are many convincing theoretical reasons for the purposes and use of art-based approaches to psychological research which other academics have already made, and which I don’t have the room to expound upon here.  On a personal note, however, I can only add that utilising the creative arts within my research has enabled me to connect with the body of academic work that I had previously felt isolated from, to pull out and examine Stead’s pain and panic, escape and joy, along with many other aspects of my experience that had previously been lost within the shadows and the silence. In doing so I hope that these artworks, in turn, connect with others, and in this connection allow complex knowledge created to become complex knowledge shared.

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