Spilled Ink: Designing Creative, Autobiographical Podcasts as a Means of Generating Dialogue about Mental Health and Addiction

This presentation uses work in progress to illustrate the potential of podcasting to shape an episodic, autobiographical narrative that contributes to existing discourses surrounding mental health and addiction issues among young people. The practice-led artistic inquiry considers a period in my life when I experienced a battle with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and addiction. The project traverses a range of media including written autobiographical text, animated film and sound design.Suffering in private for fear of being stigmatised or discriminated against if exposed publicly with a mental illness or addiction is a powerful deterrent to help-seeking (Flett et al., 2020). However, research suggests that disclosing lived experience stories of mental illness and addiction can lead to more positive attitudes towards mental health (Lindstrom et al., 2021). By foregrounding my lived experience story and subsequent recovery in a public arena, the thesis project seeks to support social change by fostering empathy, decreasing self and social stigma, and creating opportunities for dynamic dialogue.Methodologically, the study constitutes a heuristic-autoethnographic inquiry (Ings, 2014) where iterations of practice are resourced and reflected upon as the artefact is refined. The project’s significance lies in its ability to meaningfully communicate an aural and visual authored, embodied experience through a digital medium, thereby providing an alternative to available material that tends towards the analysis of research data or news media narrative. By using podcasting as a platform for artistic practice, the study will contribute to a growing body of discourse that explores the perimeters of podcasting as a media form and renders more accessible, first-person narratives that connect stories of experience to mental health support networks. The thesis will also contribute through practice and exegetical writing, to current research relating to correlations between certain mental health conditions and creativity.