Dr. Béres receives SSHRC grant to promote healing though journaling

Dr. Laura Béres, Associate Professor of Social Work, has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant for a collaboration with Wellspring London and Region to develop a creative writing group, Journey Through Words: Narrative Writing for Cancer Patients, for Wellspring’s service users.

Wellspring London and Region is a local charitable organization that provides supports for people living with cancer, and their family members. Journey Through Words: Narrative Writing for Cancer Patients offers people touched by cancer patients to journal their journey through cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

The project is a collaboration between Western medical students, Wellspring and the King’s School of Social Work.

Dr. Béres was asked to participate due to her expertise in narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is a therapeutic approach informed by postmodernism, social constructionism and critical social theories, supporting service users’ own knowledge and expertise so as to examine and re-author events in their lives. This can empower them from moving from problem saturated storylines to more resilient and preferred storylines.

A planning and pilot group was formed in the 2020-21 academic year, made up of Dr. Béres, Anmol Chandla, an MSW student placed at Wellspring for her practicum, three Western medical students (Divya Raman Santhanam, Nick Maizlin and Suhaima Tunio) and Valerie Johnston-Way, a Wellspring Program Manager. Dr. Vidya Natarajan, Assistant Professor and Assistant Coordinator, Writing, offered consultation on writing prompts.

The team completed a pilot group during the 2020-21 academic year. The group was offered online for six to eight patients and facilitated by Chandla and Santhanam. Each session ran for an hour and a half, and included a creative writing prompt, followed by 20 minutes of writing and a subsequent discussion.

It was crucial to understand how the creative writing process was experienced by participants. While engaging people in telling their illness story can be empowering, there is also the risk of experiencing re-traumatization by focusing on only their diagnosis and illness, unless space and time is also available for reflecting upon resilience and what has kept people going through their cancer journey.

The pilot project went well, Wellspring was pleased with the results, and so Dr. Béres applied for the SSHRC PEG funding with Wellspring’s Executive Director, Tracey Jones, in order to further develop the program. The outcomes of this research will be a group manual and greater understanding about what participants experience in the creative writing group process.

Another MSW student, Leah Getchell, has been placed at Wellspring for the 2021-22 academic year, partnering with another Western medical student, Amandi Perara, to update the sequencing of topics and writing prompts for the participants, based on feedback from the pilot project participants. They have now completed a second series of the group, Journey Through Words: Narrative Writing for Cancer Patients. It has been offered in a hybrid format this year, with some in person and some joining the group sessions online.

The funding has allowed Dr. Béres to hire Leah Getchell as a research assistant. Dr. Béres and Ms. Getchell will use a narrative inquiry approach to interview those group participants willing to be interviewed about their experience of being in the group and engaging with creative writing as a therapeutic tool.

The grant-funded project will expand knowledge regarding the creative writing process in a therapeutic group format and, following interviews with current participants, develop a group manual for use across Wellspring's nine Canadian sites. The manual will be shared in an open access format so other agencies can also make use of it.

“Wellspring offers a variety of support and therapeutic groups to people affected by a cancer diagnosis. Many of these groups are offered by volunteers. This creative writing group manual allows for others besides those trained in narrative therapy, narrative medicine, and creative writing, to offer this specialized group to people who are drawn to the process of creative writing. It offers more choice to people affected by a cancer diagnosis,” says Dr. Béres.

SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities that will inform decision-making at a single partner organization from the public, private or not-for-profit sector. The small-scale, stakeholder-driven partnerships supported through Partnership Engage Grants are meant to respond to immediate needs and time constraints facing organizations in non-academic sectors. In addressing an organization’s specific need, challenge and/or opportunity, these partnerships let non-academic organizations and postsecondary researchers access each other’s unique knowledge, expertise and capabilities on topics of mutual interest.