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Impact of the Reading Bodies Anthology

The Reading Bodies project aims to challenge common assumptions about burnout by fostering communication and a sense of community through creativity. One of the main goals of the Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload, and Resilience creative anthology – published in collaboration with Riptide Journal (2024) – was to help reduce social stigma through language and artistic expression.

To understand the impact of the anthology, we shared feedback forms with participants to learn if and how their attitudes and behaviours toward burnout had changed since taking part in the project.

By measuring the data from these feedback forms, we have identified key impacts such as building community and behavioural change. For example, 80% of respondents said that when reading the anthology, they felt a sense of shared experience and community. Additionally, a further 80% of respondents said that by contributing to the anthology, they have an increased willingness to share ideas and experiences about burnout, overload, and resilience.

‘[The anthology] creates a powerful sense of solidarity, care and community amongst people who will never meet but share solidarity through creativity.’

Anthology Contributor

‘[The book] being made and out in the world is a very empowering feeling.’

Anthology Contributor

You can read the digital version of the anthology as a flipbook and via our website here. You can also find the anthology on the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub, a knowledge-sharing platform for healthy practices developed in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe.

To read an interview with Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze discussing the public engagement initiatives from the Reading Bodies project, please click here.

We plan to apply insights from the anthology on the language used to describe feelings of burnout to develop resources that help medical professionals better understand patient experiences.

We hope the project will inspire further conversations about the importance of health and mental health in our personal and professional lives.  

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Events News

Writing Bodies – Creative Writing Sessions in London

As part of our Reading Bodies public engagement initiative, Dr Olivia Glaze hosted two creative writing sessions in London which focused on the theme of the body.

The first ‘Writing Bodies’ session took place at the Battersea Arts Centre on 7 November 2024, followed by the second session at St Marylebone Parish Church on 20 February 2025. These events provided a welcoming space for participants to explore or enhance their creative writing skills while fostering a sense of community.

Participants created a variety of writing styles, including fiction, personal essays, poetry, and haikus, focusing on themes such as ageing, illness, and body confidence. They also offered thoughtful feedback on each other’s writing, fostering a supportive and collaborative writing environment.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and shared their creativity with us! We hope you continue to write and explore your storytelling journey.

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Burnout, Overload, and Resilience in Personal and Planetary Health: How Co-Creating Interdisciplinary Poetry Helps

By Dr Sally Flint, Project Partner for Reading Bodies and Creative Lead for We Are the Possible

‘We need / To leap / Right now / To the next stage / Of our evolution.’
Ben Okri

Burnout, Overload, and Resilience are words that in 2024 challenge analysis in literature, healthcare, and the media, especially alongside trending headlines which can often include crisisdoomsday, disaster, pollution, guilt, greenwashing, catastrophe, apocalypse, anxiety – all used to stress the global climate emergency, and the need to urgently change the way we consume and live. It’s like being in a crammed washing machine of words on a fast spin of environmental and societal problems. A recent article shows that neurologists are ‘alarmed’: ‘Everybody has a Breaking Point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains’  (C. P. Aldern, Guardian, 2024). While writing this, the latest pop-up on my PC reads – ‘but don’t confuse burnout with being busy!’  

Therefore, it was intriguing and timely to deliver a creative writing workshop where we can create a collection of writing inspired by the Reading Bodies project using Burnout, Overload and Resilience as launch pads. To do this, as a writer, editor, and creative writing lecturer working at the interface of science, health, education, translation, and the arts, I adapted a workshop and editing methodology I established to ‘share insights across languages and academic disciplines.’ At the workshop, we considered different approaches to the theme of burnout, including workplace and caring pressures, strategies for dealing with stress, and connections with individual health.

I used a unique collaborative creative writing approach developed in 2017 when working with Met Office scientists on ways to communicate climate data to the public through the arts and science. On a NERC-funded yearlong project, Climate Storiesled by renowned climate scientist Professor Peter Stott, a group of climate scientists and art practitioners shared and experimented with narrative forms. Both willing and wary, we joined in creative writing, performance, printmaking, and music workshops. As the Creative Writing Lead, I encouraged writing that ‘showed’ working in the field of climate change, and the scientists’ stories that erupted were startling, from ice cracking in the Arctic to fleeing forest fires in South America. This storytelling approach helped scientists understand how using the senses to explain data – what they could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell – brought to life what it’s really like on the frontline of climate change.

Then, as the Covid crisis spread and the world stalled, Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon (Director, We Are the Possible, University of Exeter), had an inspired vision to bring together science, health, education, translation, and the arts to communicate to broad audiences how human health relies on maintaining, restoring and protecting planetary health and ecosystems. Following a unique creative and editorial process, a collection of poems was published, and with the support of the Met Office UK, we delivered One Chance Left – 12 poems co-created by climate scientists and health professionals at an event in the first-ever Science Pavilion at the COP26 climate conference (Glasgow 2021). The poems, underpinned by science and health research, received such a positive reaction that by 2022 our team had grown to include not only scientists and health professionals, but educators, translators, youth leaders, and artists in the UK and Egypt, using a now proven creative collaborative way of working which resulted in We Still Have a Chance – 12 stories for 12 days of COP27  (Egypt 2022) which reached over 28 million people and counting.

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Events News

Reading Bodies Creative Writing Workshop: Burnout, Overload, and Resilience – 14 June 2024

Thank you so much to our participants and speakers for joining our Creative Writing workshop on “Burnout, Overload, and Resilience,” held at the University of Exeter on June 14, 2024. The event was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies), Dr. Sally Flint (Lecturer in Creative Writing), and Dr. Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher) and we were thrilled to welcome such a diverse group to the event – which included teachers, entrepreneurs, NHS practitioners, yoga teachers, a live illustrator, academics, and postgraduate students. 

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Articles

Considering Female Mental Illness in Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972): The Hysterical Woman and her Dog

By Dr Olivia Glaze, AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Exeter

References to madness, insanity, melancholia, and hysteria have long plagued the diagnoses of female mental illness. The crazed, raving, and unstable woman is a prevalent trope that has long persisted within Western literature, from Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) and Bertha Mason in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Historically, madness, hysteria, and melancholia have been considered female afflictions due to an assumed inherent feminine proximity to wrecked nerves and sexual disorders – indeed, the word hysteria is derived from the Greek word “hysteron” or womb. In the late nineteenth century, understanding the ‘female’ illness of hysteria was a central focus of studies, led by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at his infamous Parisian asylum, Salpêtrière. Charcot transformed the hospital into an internationally renowned site of neurological teaching, with Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet amongst his students.