Stakeholders facilitating hope and empowerment amidst social suffering: A qualitative documentary analysis exploring lives of homeless women with mental illness.

Background: Globally homeless mentally ill (HMI) individuals are considered one of the most vulnerable populations. An individual-centric, psychopathology-oriented focus of the existing mental health-care system limits the understanding of the HMI individuals through the disability lens overlooking their strengths and resilience that enable them to survive extremely hostile environments. Contemporary mental health research has embraced a paradigm shift that allows researchers to look beyond the predominant medical model to give precedence to a socio-culturally contexted and experientially firm understanding of human behaviour.

On the Social Constructionist Approach to Traumatized Selves in Post-disaster Settings: State-Induced Violence in Nandigram, India.

Through the use of concepts such as traumatization and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the distressing experiences of survivors are understood in psychology and psychiatry primarily as the behavioural symptoms resulting supposedly from an incomplete emotional and cognitive processing of traumatic events. Due to such an exclusive focus on the intra-psychic processes, besides the survivors' healing facilitated by cultural beliefs and symbols, their trauma-related distress associated with the cultural interpretation of loss is also generally ignored. This paper illustrates the utility of the social constructionist paradigm in understanding the survivors' experiences of suffering and healing within the cultural and socio-political context of violence through an ethnographic study among the poor farmers of Nandigram, India, inflicted by violence from the state government as it tried to forcibly acquire their land to build a chemical factory.

The research relationship as a facilitator of remoralization and self-growth: postearthquake suffering and healing.

In new-paradigm research, empathic witnessing by the researcher might create within the researcher-participant relationship a space for participants to share and transcend their suffering. I explore this theme through the constructionist grounded theory analysis of interviews, fieldnotes, and my self-reflexive commentary from an original study conducted to understand the experiences of suffering and healing among the survivors of an earthquake that occurred in India in 2001. The five categories that emerged--getting overwhelmed while verbalizing suffering, search for the cultural meaning of the research relationship, piecing together of self, reaffirmation of moral status, and continuing bond revalidating the self--provide insights about this theme.