Samantha Jayne Goddard, a student at York St John University, introduces herself and her exciting new PhD research undertaking!
Hello! I’m Samantha Jayne Goddard, a PhD student at York St John. I started my studentship at the beginning of July 2022, and have spent the past 5 weeks settling back into student life and starting to plan my first steps as a researcher. I’ve been working in mental health in various settings in York since I moved here in 2011, and I’m also an artist and photographer – I have an MA in Art Psychotherapy Practice. My masters thesis looked at using creative therapies to explore medically unexplained symptoms, the mind-body divide, and how people in the UK struggle to get adequate support for conditions that are often stigmatised and misunderstood as “all in your head”, or to have a “psychogenic” component. I’m really interested in creative approaches to health and wellbeing.
I’m very excited to be working on a PhD at York St John exploring and evaluating York’s Connecting Our City mental health transformation project. My research is taking a deep dive into the Trieste model of mental health service design in Italy and what York can learn from this, community hubs as ways to improve access to support, and taking more strengths based, holistic approach to mental health support in the community. I’m really interested in the opportunities – but also the challenges – that moving away from a more medicalised view of mental health creates for our communities. I also plan to bring my background as an art psychotherapist and artist practitioner into my research by considering alternative research outputs and running workshops that use creative processes to explore topics. I really want to capture the voices of people often left out of research and service transformation, and explore different ways of understanding the complex systems involved in mental health service design and delivery.
I absolutely adore York, and can’t think of a better place to be situated than at York St John, with the guidance of Lynne Gabriel and the Communities Centre – and the many incredible people involved in shaping the Connecting Our City project. I’d love to hear from anyone interested in this research, and look forward to the adventure the next 3 years will bring. You can connect with me on Twitter @SamJayneGoddard, or reach me at samantha.Goddard@yorksj.ac.uk.