About

SICK! Festival: On the Couch - Painful Narratives

Location: BSMS Lecture Theatre, BSMS Teaching Building, University of Sussex

What are the opportunities and limitations that narrative offers in dealing with traumatic experience, for individuals, artists and clinicians? The arts have always employed narrative as a means of understanding human conditions. Scientific methodologies have, perhaps, a more complex relationship with the telling of stories: Integral to the understanding of a patient’s experience, yet easily dismissed as anecdote, unreliable in comparison with large, rigorous data. As narrative medicine and psychology gain increasing credibility, artists have come to question personal narrative as a reliable way of understanding oneself and one’s history.

Chair: Prof. Bobbie Farsides (BSMS)

Panel: Dr. Dawn Edge (University of Manchester), Sue Maclaine (Artist), Ian Williams (Physician, Comics artist and Writer)

Presented with BSMS and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts