Audio of a talk that I gave at The Science Museum, introducing ideas explored in my current research at The London Consortium. 

The key objective of this body of research, is to consider how new technologies might provide the tools for authoring alternative perspectives, on the emotional and subjective experience of mental ill health. Primarily it asserts that the practice of writing about first person experiences of mental illness online (for example on a blog or a social networking site) is a therapeutic process. Concurrently, it also suggests that the existence of such online testimonies has the capacity to open up discourses around illness that sit in opposition to the jargonistic and occasionally authoritarian languages of the medical profession, and psychoanalytic practice. Ultimately this research poses wider contextual questions about how good the use of communication technology is for our mental health, and the extent to which we ought to act to preserve and archive digital, web based testimony about emotional distress.

Vanessa Bartlett