This paper shares findings from the literature review of Andy Morris’ PhD study, which explores the complex interplay between social workers’ experiences of shame and their mental health. Using the metaphor of the “monster under the bed” to symbolize shame, the review examines key themes such as motivations for entering the profession, including altruism and personal experiences, and how these shape one’s professional identity through the lenses of Social Identity Theory and Caregiver Role Identity Theory.

The review highlights the prevalence of stress and burnout among social workers, often linked to secondary and vicarious trauma. It also examines coping mechanisms, such as stoicism, that intersect with mental health stigma. Professional stigma, compounded by fear of judgment and threats to the social worker’s identity, emerges as a significant barrier to seeking help, exacerbating hidden struggles and increasing the risk of burnout.

To move from crisis towards resilience, Tilia presents her doctoral research on RAW- resilience, advocacy and wellbeing. This research project focused on the lived experience of female leaders in health and social care in 2022, when their personal and professional lives were still situated in a global pandemic context. The study signified the inequality of gender and background of the participants within their perceived positions of power in their leadership roles.

The participants conceptualized and subsequently ‘Reclaimed Resilience’ by reflecting on the intersectionality of gender, age, health and race. They challenged the neoliberal notion of not being ‘resilient enough’ as a woman, mother, carer and leader and the politicisation of the term.

Through Appreciative Inquiry participants defined what resilience, advocacy and wellbeing meant to them in their personal and professional lives, exploring how practice in health and social care could be made safer through compassionate leadership and organisational cultures of kindness.

I am now a lecturer at the University of Stavanger, but have a background as a humanitarian worker within the field of maternal health. Humanitarian workers are often welcomed and most needed persons in the areas they go to work. They can be considered doing an important job on behalf of the society they normally live in. and private persons finance organisations that sends out humanitarian workers.
I am in the process of writing a piece and would like to present for you a character in this piece: Susanna, a humanitarian health worker.
Susanna is a humanitarian worker and have been on several missions for a humanitarian organization. She starts her work journey as an unexperienced and a little bit naïve health worker. She wants to do her little part to “save the world” and is enthusiastic when going on her first mission.
Her meeting with poverty and misery changes her in ways she had not predicted. She has her profession, her motivation and her belief system as support and as a lifeline through the missions.
She worked in a hospital in a war zone and saw poor people dying and living under tyranny. She has worked in a refugee camp and seen the despair and hopelessness among the refugees.
Looking back, she goes through the emotionally experiences she has endured, and in a safe space back home she reflects over what she has been through and the people she has met.
There are experiences that haunts her as well as experiences that she considers some of the most precious in her life. Who are we after traumatic experiences?
She reflects around repression, crisis and grief as well as what can support healing, around friendship and about finding new insight after having seen what human suffering can look like.

I am a PhD Candidate using Collaborative Auto-ethnography as methodology to elucidate two under-studied areas of trauma: Familial Child Sexual Abuse (FCSA) and hallucination, using my embodied experience of familial Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibition as a model. Incest is a confronting and taboo topic, both in practice and in public discourse, in most parts of the world. Shame, and fear (Deering, 2011), therefore, may play a large role in the silence and under-reporting of victim-survivors, as may their poorer Quality of Life Outcomes (QoL), access to education and socio-economic status (Cole & Putnam, 1992). MAOI Inhibition research has mainly focused upon male criminality with impact of female MAOI often a footnote (Mentis et al. 2021, McDermott et al. 2009). Furthermore, there is a complete absence of research/information on the impacts of MAOI driven male criminality/sexual abuse/violence on female family members.

More recently, within psychiatry and the social sciences, there has been a shift to seek out and give voice to embodied lived experiences (Belser, 2017), as exemplified by phenomenological movements including Narrative Theory and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Larsen et.al. 2022, Fuchs, 2010). These qualitative research movements seek to include survivor voices in the co-creation of therapeutic and/or social interventions, including experimentation with creative forms of expression including dance, music, theatre, narrative therapy, the use of reflexive journaling and exploration of magical themes (de Andrade 2022). However, even within these innovative, qualitative, arts and humanities informed research movements, the paucity of Familial Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) survivor voices about their embodied lived experience is glaring (Valentine 1993; Pease 2017). My presentation will be a multi-media PREZI sharing my experience of MAOI induced hallucinations and their intersection with FCSA commencing as a 12-year-old. In this way I hope to share what it means to survive FCSA, hallucinate and make meaning of trauma.

This presentation shares my experience of piloting a telepresence robot as a reasonable adjustment for teaching in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. I taught from home using the robot to facilitate interactive social science seminars. I will be focusing on realising the impact of meaningful inclusion, the development of relationships with students and colleagues within learning spaces and how a sense of self and value is challenged and defined in this context. I draw on post-human discourse adopting the viewpoint of the cyborg. Where technology is used as an extension of the self, the cyborg narrative challenges dominant discourses of technology that are framed as ‘assistive’. Therefore, centring my experience as a disabled person, is key in understanding ‘virtual embodiment’ and the impact upon my identity during a time which is hailed as ‘post-COVID’. I reflect on the institutional barriers encountered and propose strategies for wide-scale rollout of telepresence as a reasonable adjustment for all. I have dreamed of fleets of telepresence robots being available at all public spaces, and the cost of not supporting this cyborg dream is not a financial one but an ethical and human one. Investment in supporting disabled people’s right to work, and right to a full life can be a practical demonstration of ethical rigour and aligns with the shared missions of equality and diversity present across all higher education institutions.