Conference Agenda

Changing epidemiology, demographics, and ethnographies, including bio-psycho-socio-cultural expertise and advancements, have prompted a wave of global and collaborative scholarship bridging the gap between mental ill-health and well-being. Research methodologies are socially and politically oriented. Quantitative research methods tend to influence policies, while qualitative methods influence practice. Qualitative research participants are considered experts through their lifeworld experience and are ideally situated to answer "the how" and "why" of mental ill-health. This provides opportunities to further explore "the what" of quantitative research, allowing supportive bridges to be built towards enhancing well-being within the individual and in the wider community, as well as healthy collaboration within research communities. Research literature demonstrates the aetiology of mental ill-health and distress as multifactorial, whilst illuminating embodied conflict between a person's internal and external lifeworld. Qualitative methodologies seek to gain a deeper understanding of the meanings individuals attribute to these aspects of their lived experiences. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) has matured as a qualitative research methodology, investigating and dialoguing with multi-layered mental health and well-being topics that matter to individuals and communities, providing valuable insights into everyday experiences that are underrepresented in research literature. This presentation delivers insight into a global community of frontline qualitative research practice.

This presentation illuminates IPA’s “goodness of fit” for both participants and researchers, where it is the chosen qualitative methodology to explore in-depth emotive lifeworld experiences that matter. IPA privileges many key areas of lived experience and its impact, which are frequently associated with mental health and well-being such as the participants: uniqueness, thoughts, feelings, behaviours, language, social relationships, and meaning-making. Equally, IPA values the researcher’s expertise, their personal experience and the tacit parallel impact of the participant’s experience on the researcher. Little is written in the literature to date about the untapped tacit power of IPA during data collection and analysis, where the embodied researcher both touches and is touched by the emotive experiences of participants, including their suffering. Thus, IPA has the capacity to facilitate and enhance the interpretation and sense-making of multi-layered complex mental health and well-being experiences, bridging gaps in the horizons of understanding between individual participants, researchers and their interconnected collective lifeworlds. In this way, IPA compels and mentors the researcher to remain open to uncovering the hidden gems within participants’ data, in order to better inform and influence mental health and well-being practices locally, nationally and internationally.

This Presentation draws from new qualitative research into the impact of student suicide on Irish secondary school guidance counsellors (GCs), who are highly likely to encounter the loss of a student to suicide and deal with the aftermath. This qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study aimed to give voice to this cohort of frontline professionals. Participants reported a ‘gap’, a 'systemic disconnect', in the National psychological support services’ guidelines and interventions to adequately serve the mental health and well-being needs of vulnerable school communities in the aftermath of student suicide. Data analysis identified the significant emotional impact and felt responsibility in participants as frontline carers. Their need to respond to a ‘tsunami’ of traumatised students, frequently exacerbated by a dissonance with the suicide postvention protocols, left them feeling disempowered in their role. It highlights how participants were further burdened by systemic disconnect, ambiguity and organisational double-bind while relying on personal resources to ensure professional self-care. The study’s findings provide insight that can positively influence school mental health clinical practice, critical incident protocols and policy. The vision is to bridge the systemic gap to better serve the needs of school communities, meanwhile trying to mitigate systemic harm.

This longitudinal qualitative study exposed the devastating impact of unactioned longing on everyday human lives, and the imperative of accounting for longing in health and wellbeing practice and public policy. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) the study tracked human longing over four months. It identified the interrelationships between actioned/unactioned longing and shame, trust, and connection (with self, others and the world). The study was based on an online wellbeing-through-writing program, and embedded inside a salutogenic (origins of health) theoretical framework. It resulted in the development of a model for actioning longing to achieve recovery, growth and lifeworld transformation. The study also resulted in the introduction of a new concept in health and wellbeing research: the significance of languaging the feeling body through writing to a) overcoming shame, b) actioning longing, and c) the consequential nature of rising courage. It concludes that health and wellbeing practitioners and policymakers who do not pay attention to human longing, as experienced through the feeling body, fail clients and communities; and that salutogenic growth – in health, wellness and effective public policy – is achieved through operationalising the longing of the human heart.