What's in your dash? Is reading Brene Brown an act of political, social, and cultural resistance to traditional intellectuals?

This doctoral project uses three philosophical frames, Gramsci, Brene Brown and Lived Experience, to challenge the demeriting of the wisdom and lived experience of people with self-identified, non-psychotic, mental health challenges following a life-changing event. It probes first, “What’s in your dash?” to discover why and how readers use Professor Brown's work. “The Dash” is a poem by Linda Ellis that refers to the line - the dash - between the Date of Birth and Death on a tombstone or memorial plaque. That one signifier is the sum of all a person was and everything they did. That dash is the evidence of their life’s work that is often not seen until their demise. By enacting this research through a process of book clubs, this doctoral inquiry is an act of political, social, and cultural resistance against the demeriting of the ways educative literature is read and used by the masses: grey and popular literature as worthy evidence of psychoeducation. The use of book clubs, as both methodology and method, investigates the psychoeducative evidence dash of participants. Discovering evidence through book club discussions of whether reading Dr. Brene Brown’s popular psychology based on her Shame Resilience Theory acts as a psychoeductative modality with an added bibliotherapeutic intervention of helping another person in their community, is the goal. Reading as an act of resistance to a dominant medical model diagnosis following a life-changing event is the significant and original contribution to knowledge: a contribution to my dash and to the wider body of philosophy. For mental health and Lived Experience practitioners working with Focused Psychological Strategies, this provides an evidence base for the use of using Dr Brown's work as a psychoeducative and bibliotherapeutic recovery tool.