Review

Research broken down

FORBIDDEN NARRATIVES: critical autobiography as social science
Kathryn Church
Gordon and Breach, 1995

Forbidden Narratives is based on research with psychiatric survivors involved in a community mental health project. It tells a story not just of the social and emotional relations between mental health professionals and psychiatric survivors, but also of the author and her changing relationship to her project and the people involved in it. She draws on feminism and post-structuralism to claim ‘intellectual legitimacy’ for ‘personal narrative and experiential knowledge’ and philosophical acknowledgement that the ‘observer’ is always part of what can be known.

Forbidden Narratives is radical and original in the way in which Church demonstrates, discusses and reflects on her relationship to her research participants and to the research itself. It is an engrossing, painful and exhilarating read; unusually in a social sciences text, Church acknowledges and expresses the emotional nature of research.

Originally she wanted her research to be ‘survivor-directed’, but her legitimacy for such a project was questioned by a survivor. Church wrote then: ‘I am too cool and smooth for her... She wants to see my pain and my passion so that she can trust me and I being intensely private (prairie roots et al) am congenitally disposed to hiding all that.’

Church had to feel and demonstrate her own pain in order to gain the participants’ confidence and trust. After this, Church herself had a ‘breakdown’, of which she writes: ‘Eight years ago I did intellectual work on behalf of psychiatric survivors from within the relative privacy of a job. I view this now as a position of privilege which I had to ‘unlearn’ in order to be more emotionally and personally present in my relationships with people in the survivor movement. While crucial, this personal involvement is not to be taken lightly. Opening myself up to survivor pain was a significant factor in my breakdown.’

All too often the contingency and messiness of research is ‘glossed over’ in order to produce a neat research story. Not only does this comply with an academic culture which prioritises intellect at the expense of emotion, it also protects the researcher. Church vividly demonstrates that the vulnerability involved in research of this nature should not be underestimated.