July 2022 Update
The Your Storyline team is developing a health-focused storytelling process, using focus groups and pilot testing to design an App.
We have worked with patient and community stakeholder partners throughout to ensure that communication of the digital storytelling process is intuitive and human centered. Steve Coppola of Input UX, who has a wealth of experience in app development, is working with us to translate our vision into detailed on-screen experiences that are memorable and engaging for Your storyline target users: patients, caregivers, community members and healthcare providers.
About the App
We have also been working with CAMH’s Privacy, IT and Legal departments to ensure we follow best practices in relation to web-app security, as well as recommendations to safeguard against digital fraud and ensure critical personal and/or health information are protected. Pandemic related disruptions have impacted the progress of the project; we are anticipating completion of the project by March 31, 2022.
Your Storyline App is an innovative means of incorporating story telling back into health care where it has been missing throughout industrial societies. Utilizing modern technology,
Your Storyline App leverages access to mobile technology to facilitate documentation of our continuous health stories.
Your Storyline App encourages and enables users to capture thoughts, feelings and activities immediately to share with health professionals, friends and others, as they choose.
Your Storyline App: Enhancing health, one story at a time, together
As healthcare providers and advocates, we believe deeply in the growth potential and restorative power of storytelling, the centrality of story in relationships, and the ability of story to center patients as experts in their health. While healthcare is shifting towards patient-centered approaches, the sharing of stories is not always easy due to resource constraints and practice realities. This presents an unfortunate gap in health practice because storytelling is a recognized mechanism for reflection, interaction, and enhanced humanism and compassion in healthcare at the individual and institutional level. The process of thinking through stories, of re-examining thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs, can lead to growth. This storying of experience is especially relevant in health contexts; story, itself, is central to the meaning-making process inherent to health and wellness.
Our innovation brings together our extensive engagement in community mental health, patient-oriented research, digital health equity, and digital storytelling to create Your Storyline, a mobile app that will bring storytelling tools to patients, providers, and caregivers around the world. With the widespread availability of smartphone devices and tablets, we now carry the tools required to document and digitize stories (microphones, cameras, text notes) in our back pockets. Your Storyline app will allow users to identify meaningful moments in their health experience through reflective storytelling prompts, and combine these moments into storylines using multi-media (images, video clips, audio recordings, or textual notes) that are imported or created within the app. Users will be supported with tools and prompts to elicit, record, create, revise, and reflect on personal stories of health. Your Storyline app creates a safe space for stories to be formulated privately, and then exported, shared, or added to an electronic health file. Storied moments can be indexed, organized, and reorganized at any time through personalized hashtags, such as #mybirthstory, #depression, or #diagnosis. This will allow users to systematically search their storied moments, to reflect on these collections of experience, and to export them into storylines. Ultimately, we expect this app, in conjunction with the online community for story sharing, to foster the creation and sharing of health-related narratives, with tools for reflection on ‘changing the storyline’ to foster resilience and community.
About the Team
CAMH: Award Amount $30,000
Chantalle Clarkin RN, PhD is a registered nurse with over 19 years of experience working with children and youth in variety of practice contexts. Her career began at the bedside in pediatric surgery and acute care, then transitioned to community-engaged research with a focus on youth participatory methods. Chantalle completed a Master’s of Science in Nursing (2009, University of Ottawa), and a Doctorate in Education with a concentration in Society, Culture, and Literacies (2018, University of Ottawa). Her doctoral research focused on maternal health and meaning-making with pregnant and parenting youth living in a temporary urban maternity shelter. Years of bedside nursing practice and arts-engaged research projects fueled her passion to explore the restorative power of story-sharing across the continuum of health and wellness. This resulted in the completion of a diploma in Non-Fiction Media and Documentary Filmmaking (Documentary Film Institute, 2017). Her current research interests include community-based intergenerational storytelling, digital storytelling with underserved groups, film as a mechanism for education and change, and arts-engaged research for civic engagement and social activism. Chantalle is a Project Scientist in Virtual Mental Health and Outreach at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She is also the Associate Director of HeART Lab, a research unit that aims to enhance health and equity through arts-based research and technology.
Allison Crawford MD, PhD is a psychiatrist, Clinician Scientist and Associate Chief of Virtual Mental Health and Outreach at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and English at the University of Toronto. She has extensive experience in innovative program development and virtual mental health. Allison’s research focuses on health equity, digital health, digital compassion, and working with communities to provide care that is culturally relevant. Within that, she has worked on initiatives related to suicide prevention and early childhood adversity, including in Indigenous communities, nationally and internationally. Her clinical expertise is in psychological trauma, including trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy and narrative exposure therapy. In addition to extensive research and practice in mental health, Allison has a PhD in English literature, and brings arts-informed approaches to community engagement, public health, research, and education. She is Editor-in-Chief of Ars Medica, a biannual literary journal that explores the interface between arts and health, and co-curator of The Body Electric, an annual visual art exhibition that explores themes in health from new critical and artistic angles. She is the founding Director of HeART LAB (healthequityART.com).
David Mastey is manager of HeART Lab, a health humanities research unit based at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada. Trained as a literary critic (PhD English, 2015), he is also manager of the Northern Psychiatric Outreach Program at CAMH, as well as managing editor of Ars Medica, an arts-focused health humanities journal. His published research can be found at https://camh.academia.edu/DavidMastey
