Shared reading & writing workshops

Increasingly Narrative Medicine is part of the undergraduate medical humanities curriculum; stories are essential to the art of practicing medicine. Narrative practice can enhance reflection on work.

This session will incorporate "shared reading", a practice that can be recommended to patients, shown to have benefits for wellbeing and mental health. There will be an opportunity for creative writing and a safe space to share reflections (optional).

Research found "four significant ‘mechanisms of action’ involved in the reading group intervention, three of which were essential to its success, the fourth influential”:

• A rich, varied, non-prescriptive diet of serious literature
• The role of the group facilitator in making the literature ‘live’ in the room
• The role of the group in offering support and a sense of community
• The creation of stimulating, non-pressurised, non-judgemental atmosphere (‘not like school’, as one participant emphatically put it) overrode considerations of physical environment

We will read extracts from the very funny book “A Spot of Bother” by Mark Haddon as a prompt for thinking about the perception of the GP, anxiety and mental health ,stigma and family dynamics. It is not essential to have read the book before -hand although it would be even better if you had. (The author also wrote “The Curious Incident of The Dog In the Night-time” ).

Previous participants enjoyed: