Spotlight: Former iBAMH student, Katie Hall, psychiatrist and researcher, reflects

Looking back, I applied to study medicine when I knew relatively little of myself or what would really fascinate me during this winding path that we call a career. Learning about the Krebs cycle as a first-year medical student felt like a reasonable enough way to spend the time, but it was finding myself in relation to patients and their distress that brought a much more complicated host of feelings to try to metabolise. For my intercalated year, I applied to study Global Health, with some lofty visions of going off eventually to treat malaria in the far-away corners of the Globe l'd had the privilege of spending chunks of my childhood. My best friend at Uni had applied for the iBAMH course, so I thought that I 'might as well' jot that down as the required second option, despite still being afflicted at that time by a (now heinous to me) notion that this would not be all that relevant to a medical degree.

The two applications landed on my lap - I completed one with a similar resigned efficiency to that I applied to learning the Krebs cycle. For the other - the iBAMH application - I had to analyse W. H. Auden's 'As / Walked Out One Evening. Having not studied English at A-level, this pushed me almost far enough out of my comfort zone to abandon the form. I hope that the following admission won't cause John Lee to revoke my B.A. (which, incidentally, I now consider one of the most important endeavours of my career to date), but it was the suggestions of my music student boyfriend that got me through the application - something along these lines:

Sam: You could comment on the sexual reference in this paragraph here.

Me: What are you talking about?! He's not even talking about sex and that doesn't sound very appropriate for an application form for an intercalated degree [it would have been hard to believe that l'd later become a Freud-reading psychiatrist).

But the more absorbed I got in this poem, with its whimsical romantic ideals of eternal love and its sobering reminder of mortality and decay, the more my mind whirred. The group interview for the iBAMH course is what clinched it for me - the curiosity, creativity, and expansiveness of thought in the room felt like a blast of fresh air - a release of energy with which the Krebs cycle couldn't compete.

The ensuing year (alongside my best pal who was well ahead of me in her awareness and understanding of the importance of the arts in medicine) was magic; the course opened my mind in ways that have influenced every aspect of career to date. Learning about the human experience, deeply, through literature, poetry, and philosophy, and learning about the paradigms of medical practice through history, has done myself and my patients a sort of justice that is difficult to put into words.

As a psychiatrist, the ability to sit with, reflect on, and support another to process these most ineffable, indescribable, inexpressible human experiences has been made possible through studying the Arts. As a clinical academic, the questioning of medical research paradigms and their relevance to various structural inequalities in our society was catalysed by some knowledge of the history of medicine.

Studying iBAMH lit a fire in me and many of my peers that burns as a resource through so many aspects of our practice. When I became interested in perinatal psychiatry research, I learnt of the challenges faced by diverse and/or disadvantaged communities in accessing treatment, not only through qualitative research, but also vividly through co-creative narrative prose.

The result of this study was a co-designed 'nature-based programme' for mothers experiencing postnatal mental health difficulties and their babies. When I observed a group being run for mothers from the refugee community, I was struck by how creatively they expressed their connection to nature, through texture gathering and making collective mandalas.

One of my favourite moments was seeing these incredible women lie on the grass, 'cloud gazing', sometimes holding each other's hands or the hands of their babies, reflecting together on memories of their home countries, of sleeping on the roof with their families who now felt almost unbearably far away, and on the solace of still all being under the same moon.

The challenge of capturing the nuance of such profound experiences according to the evaluation models that have primacy in the medical literature feels daunting. But the desire, energy, and determination to try is certainly steeped in the mind-opening | experienced as an iBAMH student.

Follow up Katie and her teams groundbreaking, participatory Mother Nature research here.