The Schizophrenia Oral History Project by Tracy McDonough and Lynda Crane (review)

The Schizophrenia Oral History Project, created by Tracy McDonough and Lynda Crane, is a nonprofit organization that shares audio-recorded interviews of people living with schizophrenia. The organization's mission is to present life stories—not just illness narratives—to educate the public, humanize people with mental illness, and reduce the stigma surrounding schizophrenia.

The project does this in two ways: first, by posting edited interviews, written stories, and photographs on its website; and second, by developing and conducting public presentations at universities and hospitals, health care organizations, and advocacy groups. While there are other media outlets that have interviewed people with schizophrenia about their illnesses and published edited interviews online, this project seems to be the first and only of its kind to collect comprehensive life history interviews with the goal of presenting people with schizophrenia as holistic, multidimensional human beings.

The website itself is designed simply with basic functionality. The home page features a photo slideshow with several amateur snapshots of a few of the narrators. A brief paragraph under the slideshow describes the project as an "archive of life stories of persons with schizophrenia." Tabs at the top connect users to each page: "Meet our Narrators," "Tell Us Your Story," "About," "Talks and Pubs," and "Donate." The background image on each page is a yellow sunburst. While the sunshine is a welcoming graphic, it is very bright, making it hard to read the text as it scrolls over.

The "Meet our Narrators" page is the heart of the site and contains one long column of thirty-nine small headshots with a name next to each. Clicking on the name navigates the user to another page with a larger photograph of the narrator and his or her interview edited and summarized underneath, mostly in text.

Each of these pages begins with a message from the narrator—a brief excerpt written in large text with an accompanying audio clip. These snippets are a powerful, ideal way to promote the project's mission. They illustrate in the narrators' own words their undeniable humanity and exhibit their relatability. In one featuring a narrator named Alice, the message is "I'm a good person. Just because I have this illness doesn't mean I'm not a good person. I'm not dangerous. I'm just a human being … with a problem."

Underneath the messages are lengthy written summaries interspersed with audio clips. The interviews seem to take a life history approach—they progress chronologically, starting with the subjects' age, background, and family upbringing, then proceeding to education, diagnoses, struggles with the symptoms of schizophrenia, jobs, careers, relationships, difficulties with health care, and what they hope for their future. At the end, each interviewee is asked why he or she wanted to participate in the program. Most narrators confirm the project's mission: they are happy to be able to share their story, thrilled to be asked to tell it, glad to be viewed as a person, and hopeful that they can help someone else.

To this end, the audio clips are far more effective than the text-based narratives, which, rather than transcripts, are written in the third person and recite facts (example: "Marshall was placed in a mental health unit where he completed a program and began regularly taking medication again. Following his time in prison, Marshall lived in a halfway house, but was also hospitalized a few times, making for a total of four or five hospitalizations in Kentucky and a few in Cincinnati. He then went to another halfway house, where he did well"). Such recitations tend to detach the reader from the narrator.

On the other hand, the audio clips and direct quotations interspersed throughout the essays help personalize the stories and break down the barrier between website visitor and the narrator, bringing them into closer conversation. The clips are short, two to three minutes long each. The audio is not of the best quality, and the editing is not always clean, but the narrators' voices...