Storytelling is the vivid description of ideas, beliefs, personal experiences, and life-lessons through stories or narratives that may evoke powerful emotions and insights. This research aimed to explore the experience of storytelling among correctional officers who encountered prisoners’ suicidal behaviour.
Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, participants were assisted in developing their own written stories about their experiences with prisoners’ suicidal behaviour, focusing on the aspects that were the most difficult or stressful for them. These stories were written in collaboration between the individual participant and the researcher. As individuals are the experts on their experiences, including them as the center of attention ensures the authenticity of the stories and avoids presenting experiences in an oversimplified and superficial way. Through co-creating stories with people with lived experiences, we were also able to ensure the empowerment of the person telling the story. Simultaneously, we ensured that participants were adequately psychologically prepared for the storytelling experience.
Through the interviews and the creation of the stories, we gained insights into correctional officers’ experiences as gatekeepers. Additionally, we explored how they experienced storytelling, more specifically, how they experienced writing their own story about their encounters with prisoners' suicidal behaviour and reading stories from other correctional officers who faced similar situations. Analyzed using the grounded theory approach, the findings illuminate how storytelling can serve as a mental health intervention to bolster and preserve the mental health of correctional officers. In particular, results help us to prepare all steps of the storytelling intervention in accordance with the unique needs and specific charachterictis of correctional officers, experiencing prisoners’ suicidal behaviour.
Our study fills a gap in the field of research on storytelling as a mental health intervention, as it is the first study where the researcher was closely and individually involved in the process of storytelling, allowing deeper understanding of the experience of storytelling. Moreover, it is the first study to examine the experience of storytelling among correctional officers who had experienced prisoners’ suicidal behaviour, thus contributing significantly to the scientific field of suicidology in both applied and theoretical contexts.