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Speaking from Experience
This project began in the context of a Clinical-Community Advanced Team practicum. Graduate students on the team were interested
in using personal accounts as a means of promoting education and advocacy and reducing stigma about serious mental illness.
These graduate students created Speaking from Experience, a speakers group of individuals who personally experience a mental illness or who have a family member who does. Speakers
give structured presentations about their experiences with mental illness in undergraduate psychology classes.
Speaking from Experience presentations are typically given by a team of three speakers and last for about 30 minutes. After introductions, speakers
present some myths and facts about mental illness and share personal stories about their experiences. The team of speakers
then presents information about mental health advocacy and takes questions from the audience. Speakers provide student audiences
with insights into the complex reality that they face, often discussing their experiences with medication, family and social
relationships, personal setbacks and gains, and offering personal advice. The goal of Speaking from Experience is to allow undergraduates to interact with people with mental illness and their supporters who are coping, suffering, and
triumphing.
The Speaking from Experience project involves recruiting and training speakers, helping to educate psychology instructors about a recovery model of mental
illness, and helping to facilitate speakers’ presentations in undergraduate classrooms. The project has been continued by
graduate students in the community psychology research group. Currently, research is being conducted to evaluate the efficacy
of Speaking from Experience in reducing social stigma and promoting education and advocacy about mental illness.
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The Community Teachers Project
This project took place within the context of a Clinical-Community Advanced Team practicum. Graduate students on the team
were interested in working with older adults and developed a partnership with a local assisted-living facility. Team members
developed the Community Teachers Project, based on elements of empowerment theory and narrative analysis. Team members conducted focus groups with older adults in
the assisted-living facility about topics that they felt qualified to talk about as “teachers” to graduate students and undergraduates.
Team members conducted detailed individual interviews with older adults who joined the project about topics that were important
in their lives. Based on interviews, older adults and team members created written narratives that documented salient experiences
in the lives of older adults. The written narratives focused on topics such as family, jobs and career, surviving war and
other challenging world events, and accounts were assembled into a book. Copies of narrative accounts were shared with participants’
family members, assisted-living staff, other residents of the facility, and undergraduates in a celebration of the project.
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Students Coping with Psychiatric Disabilities: The Lived Experience
This project took place in the context of a Clinical-Community Advanced Team practicum. The Team focused on creating resources
for university students with serious mental health problems such as depression, bi-polar disorder, severe anxiety, and obsessive
compulsive disorder. We reviewed material about supported education and guidelines for access to higher education outlined
in the Americans with Disabilities Act. Using qualitative research methods and photovoice techniques (asking people to take
pictures to represent their experiences), the team worked with students at BGSU coping with psychiatric disabilities to share
their narratives. The Team created a web site for students and faculty containing information, resources, and first-person
accounts of students coping with serious mental health problems. Click here to view website.
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Felt Obligation Towards Parents in Adulthood
This on-going research program examines the development and enactment of obligations that adults have towards their parents
across the adult life course. This program of research is particularly relevant because, for the first time in history, relationships
between children and their parents are primarily situated in adulthood. Adults now typically spend more than fifty years
relating to their parents. In our research group, we have conducted a series of studies that examine felt obligation towards
parents in young, middle age, and older adult samples. We have examined the role of gender, ethnicity, social class, and
marital status in adults’ reports of parental obligation, and have demonstrated the usefulness of felt obligation in describing
parental care giving and individual well-being. This program of research offers students the opportunity to investigate aspects
of adult family relationships in non-distressed samples across the life course.
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