Ink:Well – writing for wellbeing on the ‘Hero’s Journey’

Ink:Well is a co-investigation between a Creative Writer and a Psychologist into the importance of storytelling for good mental health. Our ‘Hero’s Journey’ pilot study used screenwriting techniques commonly taught in university seminars to develop therapeutic workshops for participants in different social settings. We trialled the relative benefits of a mythic narrative structure and archetypal characterisation in life-writing activities, testing their impact on volunteers’ wellbeing against more standard forms of memoir or autobiography, to discover whether the ‘quest’ mode could impart greater resolution and better self-reflection.

This article lists the resources selected from creative writing pedagogy and narrative therapy in the design and delivery of our survey, logging the sources we chose to describe the twelve legendary steps of the Hero’s Journey, and evaluating the quantitative and qualitative material produced by 350 participants in our live and on-line workshops, to show how this format could offer effective ‘arts on prescription’ intervention in palliative care.