Using artwork and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore the experience of coping with body dysmorphic disorder

Abstract

Body dysmorphic disorder (body dysmorphia; BDD) is a mental health condition characterised by experiencing impairing preoccupations about aspects of one’s appearance. The psychological process of coping with BDD is a highly personal and varied experience that has not yet been explored in qualitative research. It can be extremely difficult to put into language the subtle and ambiguous phenomena that one experiences when attempting to convey what it is like to live with its symptoms. Our arts-based phenomenological design invited participants to provide both visual and narrative data. Participants created artwork to represent their experiences of coping with BDD on a bad day and on a more manageable day, then took part in a semi-structured follow-up interview. In this study, we used a multimodal hermeneutic-phenomenological approach combining Boden and Eatough’s (2014) Framework for the Analysis of Drawings, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, 1996) to explore an individual’s experiences of coping with BDD.

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“…In doing so, the researchers engaged in-what they called-a triple hermeneutic process (Kirkham et al, 2015): Individuals experienced their pain pre-reflectively and pre-linguistically while they created their drawings (first level); participants then reflected on their drawings (second level) before researchers eventually interpreted the meanings (third level). A comparable approach was chosen by Craythorne, Shaw, and Larkin (2020), who asked study participants to draw their experiences of coping with body dysmorphic disorder.…”