Читать книгу The Mental Health and Wellbeing of Healthcare Practitioners - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Creative enquiry invites connection with the humanity of self and the other through more holistic engagement with the emotional and embodied dimensions of lived experience. In Example 1 above, where students engage in creative enquiry after a patient home visit, students comment on being ‘more inclined to think of the patients as people with individual lives’. They describe how the arts help to ‘consider the patient more deeply’ because of, for example, having to ‘think of how to display their issues visually’ or spending time ‘thinking about what colours represented the patient mood’ or what image might communicate the narrative. After listening to a patient who suffered depression, one student describes choosing dark colours, painting a ‘slumping figure’ and using a Van Gogh painting style, who, as the student noted, suffered his own depression. The dark colours, wrote the student, also represents her own sadness and weariness after listening to the sufferings of this patient [26].

Students wrote about choosing the creative piece because of specifically wanting to ‘capture his (the patient's) sadness…in a painting’, or being more easily able to ‘express emotions’ and explore feelings:

The creative piece forced me to reflect on my own personal feelings and thoughts during the home visits: what story, idea imagery…impacted on me the most… and how could I convey that same intensity of feeling I had…to others [9].

This is illustrated in the following student text:

This student text called ‘the slipper and the shoe’ symbolises the patient's attitude towards life, to live and to never give up. First year medical student Sarah Saunders meets Charles (name changed) as he faces terminal cancer (the red on the path ahead). The dark behind him represents his difficult childhood and the light and yellow part the joy of his marriage. The blue part is the tears they both shed and connected through.

… as Charles started to talk about his cancer, … the mood in the room changed. Almost without warning he began crying and I did not feel the sense of detachment that I had so hopefully thought I would. In the art work I have shown this part of the interview by a transition of blues running down the board. I have included this because I felt that it was an important moment for Charles and for me, as I think we both thought that we were strong enough, in very different ways, not to break down [9].

This is an example of how creative enquiry can explicitly engage students with what might often remain unexplored in the formal curriculum; the lived experience of being present to patients, witnessing suffering and how to manage the emotional boundaries. Research has found that intimate and emotionally laden encounters are a particular cause for feelings of professional uncertainty amongst students and junior doctors [30].