A Murmuration on Mental Health Research

Performance at the International Conference of Autoethnography, Bristol, UK, 22 July 2024

In this performance autoethnography I draw on my own experience around illness and recovery to explore how writing and performing songs might expand the horizon of possibilities of mental health research. I have in mind Arundathi Roy’s (2009, p. xi-xii) concern that I might be “allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.” At times abstract and unresolved, at times visceral and scalpel sharp, songs sometimes allow me to get at truths that are otherwise absent from existing discourse around particular terrains of experience. Here, I depend on a song I wrote in October 2023 called “Cover Me Now.”