Communicating and understanding the experience of chronic pain in adults through a combined approach of drawing and found poetry

Abstract

Chronic pain is an uncompromising and intrusive burden that affects individuals globally in an abundance of ways. The experience is often invisible and, therefore, subjective, which makes effective communication and understanding problematic. This thesis explores how creating daily pain representations, through a specific arts-based combination of drawing and “found poetry”, impacts pain communication and understanding. This combination is called the Evoke technique.

Included in this thesis are two qualitative studies that assess the merit, accessibility and significance of the Evoke technique for pain communication and understanding. Perceived barriers to effective pain communication and understanding are also explored. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is applied to understand the impact of the Evoke technique, as well as barriers to effective pain communication and understanding. Study 1 culminates in a public exhibition at the University of Atypical, Belfast. Study 2 is conducted during lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic and assesses the merits of delivering this technique in an online format.

This thesis argues that the combined visual and poetic process of the Evoke technique helps to bridge the gap between experience and language. Pain expression, through visual and poetic representation, engages a redispersion of meaning of pain vocabulary. An oscillating utility between visual and poetic representation encourages a negotiation of representative qualities of selfhood and of pain experience. It induces therapeutic benefits associated with externalisation processes. It presents the attentional pain biases, which helps to achieve greater awareness and understanding of coping mechanisms, pain behaviours and pain-related mood. This thesis presents the Evoke schema, which builds on the Evoke technique and highlights the necessary opportunity for sense-making visual and poetic pain representations. It demonstrates that combined visual and poetic pain representations, offering a linguistic bridge between pain expression and pain vocabulary, helps to reveal, realise, and communicate internal qualities of chronic pain.

Date of Award	Mar 2023
Original language	English
Supervisor	Karen Fleming (Supervisor), Justin Magee (Supervisor) & Pamela Whitaker (Supervisor)