Shame & Medicine: Spiralling

I was commissioned by the University of Exeter and Duke University, USA, to illustrate the emerging research from their ‘Shame and Medicine’ project, a multi-year project exploring shame in many facets of medicine, funded by the Wellcome Trust. I created 4 illustrations, based on interviews with American medical students, about their experiences of shame. These illustrations will be used to disseminate the research (with an academic audience) and will also be used as learning/teaching resources (with medical educators and students).

Inspiration

This is illustration 3/4 for this project, and shows how a shame experience can escalate. The student from the previous image is sitting on a bed (perhaps a call room within the hospital they work in), but the setting is warped and distorted; their self-critical thoughts are spiralling out of control, and they are completely consumed by them. The feeling of self-hatred is profound; their sense of self has become completely unstable; and the judgements focus on them being fundamentally flawed, not belonging, and being a failure: ‘You ARE stupid / incompetent / lazy’ … ‘Something wrong with you’. 

This scene is supposed to emphasise the way that shame can cause people to completely withdraw from others, because of an unshakable and corrosive feeling of being inherently abhorrent / unworthy / monstrous / defective.

Shame, although illustrated here in an approximate form based on similarities in the experiences of multiple students, is deep, personal and contextually experienced. 

Method

The swirl around the student was made from a scan of marbled paper, that was digitally manipulated. Background textures were created from scans of ink marks on paper made with a sponge. The rest of the image was rendered digitally.

Turnaround time

This image went through 3 rounds of changes, and including these adjustments took approximately 10 hours to complete.