Want to become a storyteller? Inspiration from community heroes with incredible stories of health and care

[noemi]

Yesterday @natalia_skoczylas and I hosted a gathering in Berlin to socialize people into sharing stories and join this adventure of Wellbeing in Europe. Time after time, we find it is not intuitive that someone would think they have a story to tell. Someone said: ‘I don’t know what my story could be’.

To help you get a sense of it, here are 3 great examples from courageous people who found their way into a collective effort - and helped us all make their contributions count, by connecting unexpected information into a bigger picture.

1. Meet @sabina_u, a member of an informal network of people delivering medicine to cancer patients when the state could and would not !

The Cytostatics Network seen through the eyes of a member

This story of mine only wanted to come out through an interview carried out online by Noemi. Hopefully it gives you a peek inside the very personal experience of being part of a sort of grand thing – a network of people becoming active in the healthcare provision chain and caring for each other despite not having met.   Noemi: Introduce us to the time when the cytostatics network came about. Was someone ill able or unable to access treatment from healthcare providers? How did they go by? Sab…

2. Meet @ybe, who overcame the limits of her profession and looked at how her healing skills could be better serving more people.

Trauma Tour

I have been working as a trauma therapist since 10 years. It’s not an area that many psychotherapists decide to explore in their daily practice, but ever since I can remember it was the most appealing area of psychotherapy for me. And one that is highly unexplored and somehow underrepresented. One of the reasons why I decided to try Trauma Tour is my exchange with a patient over Twitter. We’ve been talking online for a very long time about her experience, as she cannot come and see me in Bel…

3. Meet @wishcrys, who experienced on her own skin how we all struggle to provide and receive support from others through social media. Can her lessons help health professionals to assist people in grief?

@wishcrys

Being a young person in my mid-twenties for whom the internet and social media is second nature, I seamlessly took to my blog to make sense of my grief and loss. I wrote about my experiences of “holding space” for my sister in her final days (see also Heather Plett), and about learning to declutter physical artifacts despite my abstract emotional attachment to these things. I also wrote about how I felt when Facebook friends began “deep-liking” my old posts on grief and how it impeded my progress and recovery.

What is your story and how do you receive or provide care in your life? Do you have examples of the good people and efforts in your own country? Tell us about it and become a storyteller with 200 € reward for your contribution. More information about this here.