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An Annual Creative Writing Competition in Mental Health Humanities for Students in Canada: A Descriptive Report and Thematic Analysis Abraham Rudnick and Lara Hazelton
Abstract: The Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University has conducted an annual creative writing competition for undergraduate and postgraduate students among Canadian medical schools since 2010. This report briefly describes the process and thematically analyzes some output of this competition during its first decade. Both undergraduate and postgraduate students from most medical schools in Canada have applied and won recognitions for poetry, short fiction, and graphic prose works. The winning pieces commonly incorporated themes of sadness, loneliness, and death. Expansion of such an endeavor to other disciplines and countries may be beneficial. Introduction
Health humanities, which is interdisciplinary scholarship and
creativity in the humanities and arts as it relates to health, has grown in recent decades, expanding to involve non-medical disciplines as well as lived experiences of people with health challenges and their families.1 At many universities, learners are involved in health humanities initiatives, such as The Health Humanities Journal.2 Another example is the Dalhousie Department of Psychiatry Annual Student Writing Contest (ASWC),3 which is part of this department’s Medical Humanities program that is separate from but complementary to the HEAL program, Dalhousie Medical School’s Medical Humanities program (one of the first in North America).4 This creative writing competition focuses on mental health and related topics, due to the host department’s scope and faculty expertise.5 The establishment of the competition was described previously by Lara Hazelton and Nicholas Delva.6 In this report, we provide a brief overview and a thematic analysis (without quotations, so as not to identify particular authors’ themes) of the
