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“I just wanted to disappear. The only thing I could control was the length, depth and number of cuts,” echoes a young female voice above the rumblings of a lone piano. While she tells her story, images reflecting her feelings, such as an empty swing set, flash by, summarizing the speaker’s loneliness.
These sounds and pictures compose a series of short films produced by nursing professor Rhonda Goodman. She interviewed teenage girls who have injured themselves in order to give them a way to
express difficult, bottled-up feelings — what she calls “the deep ugly.”
“They’re using their skin as the canvas on which they write their story,” Goodman said.
For each film, Goodman recorded the voice of the narrator, who recounted her experiences and attempted to explain why she started injuring herself. Goodman then combined those recordings with a series of images.
So far, Goodman has interviewed seven teenagers and produced four “digital stories,” as they’re called. All of them will remain anonymous; only their voices and their stories will become public.
Goodman thinks the films are therapeutic for the participants who make them. One narrator confessed in her film: “I never told anybody — people were harsh enough.”
Some participants have taken home a copy of their video to show family members, while others just like to keep it for themselves. Those who are not comfortable enough telling their full stories have even created two films — one to show others, and a private one.
Each of the pictures used in the films is hand-selected by the interviewee. The images illustrate a point in the story or a feeling described. One film compared self-injury with other addictions, using a picture of alcohol and drugs.
In addition to the images, the subject chooses a song or musical track that Goodman layers onto the images and narration track, which, after minimal editing, results in the final film, just a few minutes long.
Goodman learned how to produce these digital stories at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Calif., on a $2,500 grant from the National Association of School Nurses.
According to Amy Hill, director of programs at the Center for Digital Storytelling, the center works on helping researchers “[develop and execute] large-scale digital storytelling projects.” It’s still a relatively new technique, but it’s being used across many academic disciplines as a research tool — though Goodman said that she hasn’t heard of anyone else using it within the nursing field yet.
Goodman will be presenting some of the films at a National Association of School Nurses conference later this month, and then at a School Nurses International conference in Hong Kong.
She hopes that giving their intimate stories an audience with school nurses from across the country and around the world will help nurses help adolescents of similar backgrounds who resort to self-injury.
“It’s a safer way to tell your story,” Goodman said. “They use this as their voice.”
