Healthcare professionals and educators are exploring how to communicate complex medical information through comics by sharing art, ideas and research.
The 15th International Graphic Medicine Conference is taking place in Ireland for the first time at the Technological University of the Shannon in Athlone.
Graphic medicine is an umbrella term for anything that takes place between the medium of comics and the area of healthcare that could mean using comics in healthcare, education or patient education, according to Dr Ian Williams, comics artist and physician and founder of graphicmedicine.org.
He said: "The most interesting bit for me is graphic novels that are autobiographical that deal with illness or disability.
"This is where people who have experienced a certain condition, or a cartoonist that may have suffered an illness like cancer or mental health problems, who make a comic or graphic novel that relates their experience."
He believes when comic characters are drawn simply it often makes it easy for people to identify with them.
Dr Williams said: "Comics and other visual media are incredibly powerful, especially as today, given the nature of people's literacy, we're heading towards a more visual society, we consume a lot of information visually.
"Comics with a combination text and image are right up there with this kind of power, they create an incredibly powerful message."
Dr Williams coined the phrase 'graphic medicine' back in 2007 and began to use it as a handy term to denote the role that comics can play in healthcare.
Over time is has been adopted as the accepted term for this area of study and practice.
Since the first conference in 2010, graphic medicine has since become a rapidly emerging field, embraced in North America - where many undergraduate and graduate courses are now taught.
It is also taught in Europe, particularly Spain and Italy but also in Germany, Austria, France and Scandinavia.
While in India, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea where graphic medicine societies have been springing up.
It is gradually being introduced in Ireland and this year's conference chairperson Jane Burns has identified that one of the goals of bringing the event to Ireland is to establish a graphic medicine community here.
Out of 25 countries attending this week, Ireland was the least prolific until 2017, now it is in the top ten.
"Oftentimes people think that comics are silly or they're for children. But what we want to do is add some gravitas to that by having this recognition by having these medical professionals to say this is an alternative way to communicate," said Ms Burns.
The theme for this year's conference is draíocht, the Irish word for magic.
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Ms Burns said: "We are in a magical time here in the Technological University of the Shannon, we're one of the newest universities, particularly here in the Faculty of Engineering.
"Part of the reason why we brought them here is we want people to discover our university, to spark some collaboration, some research, sharing of ideas, but we want people to discover the Midlands, particularly Athlone."
One of the pre-conference workshops was led by Dr Williams on ‘comics as a way of thinking’.
"We’ve been getting people to start making comics, to draw, to think about how they might use comics in a healthcare setting.
"We’re getting people from healthcare to think about using comics, either in education or maybe with their patients, and we're discussing ideas about how that might be achieved," said Dr Williams.
The workshops allow delegates to explore themes including how to foster empathy for patients and caregivers, as well as learning about how they process information themselves.
Many stories are autobiographical, Maya Milkowska-Shibat’s own disability influenced her decision to work in public health.
She was born extremely prematurely and due to a staph infection, she had to have her right arm elongated twice and had multiple surgeries during her childhood.
"After reading multiple comics, graphic memoirs, I realised that they’re a great way of getting patients and health professionals heard," she said.
Ms Milkowska-Shibat works as a medical interpreter and a graphic storyteller who decided to document her professional journey through comics.
A couple of years ago after experiencing burnout, she took some time out after the Covid-19 pandemic and discovered health humanities and graphic medicine.
After reading a book by graphic novelist MK Czwieric (who is attending the conference) on her experience working as nurse at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US, Ms Milkowska-Shibat was inspired to draw on her own experiences and create her own artwork.
"I decided that I also wanted to create a graphic memoir that will talk about my experiences as a patient undergoing multiple surgeries in childhood, and how that affected my desire to have a career in health and help others," she explained.
Among the other participants at the workshop was resident pathologist from North Carolina John Brennan who outlined how in his line of work, he deals with a lot of heavy topics such as death and cancer diagnoses.
He said: "You learn the scientific side in school, but as a clinician working in the hospital you don’t get taught how to process the emotions that come with dealing with these heavy topics.
"Cartooning in an interesting, kind of weird way, has been a way for me to sort of process some of the emotions and difficult stress that I’m feeling working in healthcare."
While most attendees work in human healthcare settings, Peggy Brosnahan from Arizona in the US is a veterinarian.
She said: "I think its wonderful. Graphic medicine is very new even in human medicine, and in veterinary medicine it’s almost non-existent.
"So the things I’m learning are just an amazing way for us to portray a lot of the things that we experienced as veterinarians and the things we’re trying to teach our students."
Making some keen observations in the workshop, Senior Vice President and Senior Diversity Officer at Dartmouth College Shontay Delalue expressed how graphic medicine engages the brain while conveying complex issues in a concise manner.
"The right side of our brain is for creativity and the left side is for logic. We’re actually putting that into practice today by drawing and forcing our right brains to work and also think logically about how this can be applied to so many people," said Ms Delalue.
Poster presentations will be on display today and tomorrow for open viewing, as well three exhibitions at the engineering faculty in TUS.
One of the most significant exhibitions is from researchers in University College Cork who are sharing their exhibition on pregnancy and loss.
The Pregnancy Loss Research Group curated the production of a graphic narrative in collaboration with Amy Lauren, an illustrator based in Dublin, to show bereaved parents’ views and experiences of hospital processes to find out why their baby died.
