ten - Individual narratives and collective knowledge: capturing lesbian, gay and bisexual service user experiences

Summary

Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. (Allison, 1996, p 39)

Even in my earliest storytelling I saw myself as overcoming adverse situations. (Hammer, 2010, p 9)

Introduction

This chapter explores the idea of capturing individual testimony to contribute to collective knowledge on lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) experiences of mental distress and mental health service use. The exploration draws upon some of my own reflections about the methodologies I have used in some of my own research, where I use personal experience both as a starting point and as a form of inquiry and then locate individual accounts as part of collective user and survivor knowledge. I attempt to situate this within the wider tradition of the use of experiential knowledge, narrative and testimony in user and survivor research. I also link the use of personal narrative to the development of individual and collective identity for LGB people. Finally, I examine the potential of autoethnography to provide a viable methodology for capturing personal testimony, experience and narrative for research on mental health and LGB people.

Marginalised memoirs and collective knowledge

Beginning with some brief contextualisation, personal narrative and first-hand experiential accounts of mental distress have not historically been valued as knowledge equal to that of professionally trained clinicians and practitioners (Beresford, 2000, 2003; Turner and Beresford, 2005; Tew et al, 2006; Sweeney et al, 2009). However, it is useful to note that one of the only encounters Sigmund Freud had with a person who experienced what would now be termed ‘psychotic symptoms’ was through the detailed memoirs of a man who had been diagnosed with ‘dementia praecox’ – now known as schizophrenia. Published in 1903, Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of my nervous illness (Schreber, 2000) gave a unique insight into his thoughts, beliefs and experiences and could arguably count as one of the first pieces of user research into mental distress. Schreber himself was the subject of his own investigation and the result was a personal account of his experience of ‘psychosis’. Freud then went on to psychoanalyse Schreber's memoirs in an attempt to establish a psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis (Freud, 2002).