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.

Current study explores the residual impact and potential transformation following a suicide attempt, investigating how survivors reconstruct their identity and meaning in life. Employing a narrative inquiry approach grounded in existential phenomenology, in-depth interviews were conducted with eight suicide attempt survivors. The analysis foregrounds the subjective experiences of participants as they navigate the aftermath of their attempts. Emerging themes include “Accepting One’s Survival for and Through Others,” which highlights the significance of interpersonal connections in fostering a sense of purpose; “Moving from Self-Shame to Self-Acceptance,” illustrating the transformative shift from internalized stigma toward self-compassion; and a “Retrospective Altered Meaning of Life,” reflecting a re-evaluation of personal values and life goals post-attempt. These narratives reveal a complex interplay between suffering and growth. The findings underscore the importance of addressing survivors’ existential struggles in clinical interventions and suicide prevention programs. By centering the lived experiences of survivors, this research contributes to a nuanced understanding of recovery processes and highlights the transformative potential inherent in confronting and transcending suicidal behaviors.

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.

Bipolar disorder affects approximately 5.7 million adult Americans every year. Most of us agree that there are many factors that are likely to contribute to a person’s chance of having the bipolar disorder. disorder. This presentation may help the researchers to probe into many unknown dimensions of bipolar disorder as this is a living biography by a patient who has been diagnosed with s chronic bipolar disorder. The patient M is a highly qualified professor and researcher in Medical Physics. M has been diagnosed as early as the symptoms of mental sickness has been overtly exposed as the family is well acquainted with experts in the field of Psychiatry. M has been on medication for the past 29 years with considerable improvement in his mental health. BADDS has four dimensions, each rated as an integer on a 0 - 100 scale, that measure four key domains of lifetime psychopathology: Mania, Depression, Psychosis and Incongruence. Two more attributes to the existing four will be presented. It took nearly 18 years to prescribe the BEST MEDICINE that comforted him. M concludes that family, correct medication, devotional religious practices were the best contributors for maintenance and also Pseudo- Cure.

Reference

https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/the-bipolar-affective-disorder-dimension-scale-badds-a-dimensiona