Conference Agenda

Suicidality and self-harm among young people in Rwanda remain underexamined, despite high reported rates and limited available support. This qualitative study explores the perspectives of young people, parents, and healthcare providers, examining how self-harm is understood, responded to, and shaped by social and cultural contexts.

Through inductive thematic analysis of interviews with 102 participants, we identify poverty, family conflict, stigma, and community rejection as key risk factors, while peer support, spirituality, and family relationships emerge as protective. Findings highlight how self-harm functions as a coping strategy, a response to distress, and a form of communication, yet community beliefs about shame and spiritual causation often exacerbate distress rather than reduce it.

Conducting research in this setting required critical reflexivity, particularly in navigating deeply personal and contested meanings of self-harm. Researchers’ professional backgrounds in psychology at times contrasted with local conceptualizations of distress, necessitating open discussion and collaborative interpretation with Rwandan team members. This experience reinforce the need for participatory, culturally embedded interventions that align with local understandings of mental health, distress, and healing. The centrality of the role of culture to cause, emotional experience, perceptions, and help-seeking for young people underscores the vital need for community integrated interventions.

Theoretical background: The diagnostic process is a crucial development in the history of illness, which shapes the personal history of patients, and indeed their very identity. Aim: Although a number of qualitative studies have attempted to explore aspects of personality disorder as a lived experience, no idiographic study of such a phenomenon has been conducted on a sample in Hungary with a focus on the actual subjective experience within the diagnostic process. The research questions include: How do psychiatric patients experience, and what meaning do they give to, their treatment in the institution? How do they interpret the diagnosis they receive? How does the diagnosis affect their identity? Methods: interpretative phenomenological analysis was used in analyzing semi-structured interviews. This study involved 6 participants, 4 women and 2 men, aged 19-32, treated in an acute psychiatric ward. Results:Three primary themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: 1)The drift and vulnerability creating the road to psychiatry 2)The diagnostic process and the experience of psychiatric inpatients, and 3)The turning point in self-awareness.Conclusions: A key condition for recovery is the acceptance and integration of an appropriate diagnosis into patient identity, significantly facilitated by the attitude and approach of caregivers during the psychiatric stay.

Narrative inquiry assumes that lives are communicated in a storied mode. Tthis assumes a construct that has a basic plot. The presentation discusses giving titles to life narratives to understand the meaning of trauma and distress in attempting to achieve of control and mental health. It is based on qualitative data from two research projects conducted in Israel: One with 20 abused Muslim women, ranging in age from 19 to 30 years, and the other with 20 Jewish women, survivors of incest. Each interviewee was asked to choose a title for her life story and elaborate on its meaning. The results indicate that titles integrate two functions: the first reflects the interviewees’ struggle to face and make sense of helplessness and powerlessness due to past experiences of seemingly meaningless pain; the second reflects the interviewees’ struggle to construct the future, including a map of tasks, vision, and existential mission. The two functions are intertwined in the titles and reflect the need to achieve mental well-being.

The discussion of the titles for life narratives is based on the conception of Sartre's “fundamental project” as a dialectic one involving past distress arising from trauma and the creation of meaning.

In psychiatry symptoms reported by the patient are deemed important to arrive at a diagnosis and decide for the best pharmacological therapy or psychoeducational or psychosocial intervention.
Usually, little attention is given to how the patients live their condition, to their experience of reality, especially when considering subjects with psychotic symptoms.
Yet the importance of the lived experience of psychosis is increasingly emphasized both for research purposes and to improve therapeutic interventions.
This project, based on the theoretical model of narrative medicine, was conducted on six subjects with psychotic episodes (subjects had different DSM-V diagnosis), in clinical remission in the moment of the study. Aim of the study was to give voice to the patients to describe their life before, during and after the most critical moment. They wrote their stories following a standard narrative track, using also images as metaphoric expression of their emotions.
The narrative process favored the development of self-awareness in the patients helping them to reframe the subjective experience of psychosis in the larger frame of their life. Storytelling led them to reflect on their inner qualities which promoted the recovery process. Finally, they could reflect on their relationship with either family members and healthcare personnel.

The present study explores the immediate needs of survivors from the massacre that happend in Israel on October 7^th, 2023. During the events citizens were exposed to tangible danger and were evicted from their homes without knowing if, or when, they will return.

A survey exploring the needs of these trauma survivors was conducted a month after October, on purpose of gaining understanding of the types of help that will be beneficial for them. It included both quantitative questions in order to examine the concrete needs of the evacuees, and open-ended questions whose purpose was to let the evacuees express their needs in their own words. 800 people responded to the quantitative questions, and less than a 100 responded to the qualitative part.

The analysis of the survey generates several central themes, including concrete and existential loneliness that is present in the evacuees' stories. The need to regain a sense of control over their lives, to be the ones who tell their stories, stood in the basis of the survivors' narratives. They expressed a wish to create a bridge of agency between the lives that they had before the trauma, and the lives that they have at present, as evacuees.