Comic Relief | CARE Cooperative

Comic Relief:

Graphic Medicine as Care for the Caregivers

Community care workers have been stretched to their capacity and exposed to ongoing trauma through their work addressing persistent health disparities in Inland Empire communities. The coronavirus pandemic and gap in Covid-19 mortality for minorities have highlighted the chronic stressors of racial injustice and dispossession that predate the pandemic and explain why these populations have higher comorbidities. While the pandemic has exacerbated ongoing stressors, the map of this crisis of care may show the way to deeper solutions. The premise of this project is that care occurs in a continuum of caretakers who also require care. Our project sought to address and complicate the question: who cares for the caregivers? This study examined the benefits of providing a comics-making workshop, combined with trauma education and somatic experiencing, as a set of resiliency tools for care providers working with traumatized populations.

Here was our recruitment flyer, created by Rocío Pichon-Rivière

We hosted a series of seven workshops with 13 amazing community caregivers who worked in education, non-profit, and healthcare settings. Each week, we explored different topics through art activities and writing exercises that helped all of us process the shared challenges and beauty inherent in the difficult role of caregiving.

Gallery Showing

We hosted a one-night only gallery showing of the artwork - which was so inspiring and so much fun! Thank you to the amazing Pain Sugar Gallery

for hosting us!

Check them out!

We hosted a one-night only gallery showing of the artwork - which was so inspiring and so much fun! Thank you to the amazing Pain Sugar Gallery

for hosting us!

Check them out!

*click to enlarge image*

Gallery Showing

We hosted a one-night only gallery showing of the artwork - which was so inspiring and so much fun! Thank you to the amazing Pain Sugar Gallery

for hosting us!

Check them out!

*click to enlarge image*

This panel addresses the need for more attention to care and the role of institutions in provider burnout prevention as a necessary precondition for providing optimal care. The model that we present requires transdisciplinary, institutional, and community collaboration, and our panel models this synergy: two medical anthropologists with an interest in graphic medicine and harm reduction, a comics studies and trauma studies scholar, and a community-based artist will present their distinct roles in the co-creation of this study. The panel is organized into four topics or parts that reflect how transdisciplinary research collaborations are required to understand the nuances of structural and individualized vicarious trauma as a vital step toward reorienting an obligation to and support for care. Focusing on the integrated parts of a single project, Part I will introduce theories of trauma used in developing a graphic medicine curriculum and bringing diverse groups together for mutual support. Part II will describe our methods and how we came together from different disciplinary backgrounds. This transdisciplinary work reorientated our roles as we reimagined what caretaking can mean. Part III will describe qualitative and ethnographic findings from the workshops and participant interviews. We will then open up questions for the panel participants regarding how transdisciplinary findings can take shape as we think beyond academic publishing. In Part IV, we will discuss the significance of naming and addressing the barriers and trauma initiated by institutions as vital to fostering life-affirming practices. Reimagining the institution through transdisciplinary collaborations can dismantle the atomization of healthcare practitioners as a source of burnout by bringing workers who serve similarly vulnerable populations together to support one another in their challenging work. The curriculum we developed teaches us to identify and treat chronic stress to the extent possible, given the working conditions across different institutions. However, thinking beyond these institutional limits, what changes can care-providing organizations enact to support and nurture their workers, and what changes might require carewebs crossing institutional borders?

Health Humanities

Consortium Conference

Philadelphia, PA 2025

Panel Participants:

Rocío Pichon-Rivière

Professor - UC Irvine, Spanish

Cynthia Huerta

Community Artist - Inland Empire

Juliet McMullin

Professor - UC Irvine, School of Medicine

Jennifer Syvertsen

Professor - UC Riverside, Anthropology

Care Work as Care Webs: Reimagining care institutions through art making with community-based providers

This panel presents and discusses the process and findings from a transdisciplinary team that developed an intervention and research study addressing vicarious trauma among community-based care providers. Current institutional working conditions in community healthcare work can be harmful to care providers and community liaisons in the form of burnout and vicarious trauma. Institutional practices often isolate healthcare workers, which leads to the emotional foundations of these forms of chronic stress. More than ever, community care workers have been stretched to their capacity and exposed to ongoing trauma through their work addressing health disparities in inland Southern California communities, whether they work directly with COVID-19 patients or other chronic illnesses, with the broader community who were affected by the fear, the economic recession, and the grief over the loss of loved ones. Our pilot study aimed to co-create and assess the feasibility of an intervention for care workers that combines trauma theory education, somatic experiencing, and comics-making to address the vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue experienced in community-based health organizations. The intervention aimed to assess the efficacy of artistic tools in supporting care providers' development of resilience and peer support in the face of working with the pain of others. It was expected, in turn, that the use of these tools could be passed on from these care workers to the community to improve their health and well-being.

“Trust the soup”: Leaning into the magic of community, care, and comics-making

for research

Studies have shown the positive effects of engaging in comics-making in managing personal illness, but these methods are rarely used among caregivers who may experience compassion fatigue and secondary trauma through their work with communities. To address and complicate the question: who cares for the caregivers? we developed a workshop series in which community caregivers created short comics that drew on their life experiences, including the challenges and joys of their work. As part of the curriculum, we incorporated trauma theory into drawing prompts to elicit discussions regarding professional stress and vicarious trauma while visualizing how different symptoms feel in the body. Participants also engaged in pre- and post-workshop surveys and interviews about their professional distress and how artmaking impacted their work lives. “Trust the soup” refers to the process of bringing diverse ideas together, providing the care and space for stories to sit and marinate, while manifesting the magic of the collective and comics. Based on our individual and collective experiences as community-engaged researchers and artist-scholars, our proposed workshop will offer practical and honest advice on the challenges, transformations, and opportunities we encountered in creating and facilitating the comic workshops with a community. Our format will also engage the audience in exercises that (literally and figuratively) draw us out of the ordinary and foster our imagination toward future projects. In light of our different positionalities and experiences in the workshops, we learned to “trust the soup” and appreciate the magical mix of community, sharing, drawing, and writing in promoting collective wellbeing.