Suffering is inevitable and innately a part of each of our human experiences, but at the same time, we also experience a multitude of fulfillment, gratitude, and peace. Through this project, we had the privilege of asking our loved ones to channel in on their sensory experiences during times of grief and pain, while also recognizing the peace and beauty through sensory experiences in times of gratitude. We invite you to scroll down and explore the following multi-media interpretations of the stories and poems shared. Following each interview, we illustrated our personal creative interpretations of the vibrant sensory manifestations of these emotions – reflecting on the ways in which each of our senses hold space for a wide spectrum of feelings. We sat with the joys and sorrows of our experiences, recognizing that they can be two sides of the same coin. All poem transcripts are found in the "Read" tab on the left hand menu. Recommendation: Listen with headphones in a cozy space.

Disclaimer: The content may contain difficult topics and language regarding suicide, violence, guilt, and mental health issues that may be triggering. Please ensure you have a process and access to emotional support from a family or friend if you are needing emotional support. 

How does this project challenge boundaries and invite creativity and innovation? 

​This project aims to challenge the medical model and the way that health practitioners approach the suffering that patients and families endure. We hope to bring to light the need for psychosocial approaches to pain and suffering in relation to mental health issues during a person’s medical journey. In western culture, the medical model is dominant and focuses on the absence of disease and treatment of symptoms through medical interventions. This poses the question of what happens when a disease is incurable? How are healthcare workers able to support the “healing” of patients then? Or the mental suffering that co-exists with the onset of physical disease? These questions emphasize the need for practitioners to develop a posture of compassion and empathy for their patients experiencing difficult medical situations or ethical conflict. This can be a challenge as through adaptation, health practitioners may present as apathetic or detached from the emotional needs of their patients. One potential solution is for the health practitioners to process the difficult emotions that can arise within these settings. The use of the ‘self’ as a tool in interventions and attuning to the patient's emotions can lead to an effective therapeutic alliance. 

​This project invites creativity and innovation as it enhances reflexivity as a means of understanding pain and resilience through the use of the 6 senses (including extrasensory). It encourages individuals to use their senses to not only understand the impact of suffering but coping mechanisms as well. It is innovative as it takes in perspectives of suffering from a wide range of individuals and looks for the commonalities between all individual experiences. This information creates unified works of art for visual representation and allows further expression of the experience. 

How does this project recognize diversity in perspectives? How does it respond to a moral or ethical dilemma within healthcare? How does this project provide new ways for healthcare practice? 

This project features 22 participants from a range of backgrounds including Indian, Bengali, Chinese-Canadian, Filipino-Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Polish. The participants age ranged from 12-65 years. Many participants were gathered from our own personal communities, family and friends. interviews were conducted using an informal interview approach with guided questions (see "Engage" section for full project guide). Some interviewers recorded their poem which was then produced into audio-medleys and visual representation seen in the "Listen & See" section.  Although, many participants shared distinct and unique experiences, we discovered more similarities in their responses to how they express and cultivate resilience. Many participants expressed they had never described suffering or resilience using their five sense previous to this project and found this activity useful in understanding themselves deeper. 

Healthcare practitioners are invited each day to live alongside a patients journey of illness diagnosis, treatment plan, procedure, recovery, and all the many pieces that lay between. There are moments where medical treatments are insufficient in healing a patient and leave practitioners seeking for alternative approaches in alleviating pain and suffering. As healthcare students, we are taught about theories and practices of treatment however, Rattner explains that the moral and ethical dilemma that arises within the work of palliative and end-of-life care is the “paradox of their professional and ethical duty to try to relieve suffering and the limitations of so doing” due to the intrinsic nature of suffering of death and dying (Berzoff, 2016). Practitioners feel helpless, incompetent and even suffer themselves. Rattner and Berzoff suggests that while tolerating suffering "sitting with suffering" allows practitioners to rethink their role in "being able to relieve some forms of psychosocial suffering intrinsic to dying" (2016). This project provides an example of how people are sitting with their own suffering and resilience at moments in their life. 

How will your project be translated into a clinically relevant activity? What are the implication of practice for students, instructors and healthcare workers? Why does this project matter? 

This project emphasizes the need for meditative and reflexive practice between patient and practitioner. It is crucial that healthcare workers investigate how patients understand their experience of suffering and resilience during their illness trajectory to better serve their context-specific needs. It has revealed that suffering and resilience are experienced by all our senses impacting our psychosocial and cognitive self. The project used informal interviews to collect each narrative highlighting the a therapeutic alliance which seeks to strengthen trust, safety, accountability, compassion and empathy created between patient and practitioner. We hope that this project provides examples of open ended questions and a creative approach to gleaning the difficult and encouraging experiences of patients while honing foundational competencies of practitioners (intentional listening, reflection, summarizing, acknowledgement etc.)

This project is produced by: Sharu Kuna, Catherine Meng, Kristen Palumbo, Diana Jugowiec, and Christen Kong Learn more: https://ipe.utoronto.ca/curriculum/students/interprofessional-health-arts-humanities-certificate-program