Dr. Pearson’s scholarly work sits at the intersection of psychiatry, narrative medicine, and medical humanities. He is interested in the ethics of medical storytelling, the clinical and educational potential of expressive arts, and the ways that personal narrative can illuminate and measure therapeutic change.
Ethics and Aesthetics of Medical Creative Nonfiction: Medical creative nonfiction—essays, memoirs, and narratives in which physicians and other medical professionals write about their patients—is widely published, yet the ethical obligations it creates for writers have received surprisingly little empirical attention. Working with a collaborator in literary studies, Dr. Pearson examines these tensions through both critical analysis and original research. This work is oriented toward developing evidence-based guidelines for writers, editors, and publishers.
“My Life, My Story" Narrative Research: In collaboration with the VA Boston’s “My Life, My Story” program, which collects first-person life narratives from veterans and places them in the medical record, Dr. Pearson is studying what veteran narratives reveal about psychological experience and therapeutic change. One strand of this work analyzes a corpus of veterans’ life stories to identify the themes veterans choose to share; a related study, in partnership with the Home Base Program at MGH, examines whether participation in an intensive clinical treatment program influences how veterans tell their own stories.
Visual Thinking Strategies in Psychiatric Education: Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a discussion-based teaching method that uses close observation of works of art to build careful attention, tolerance for ambiguity, and collaborative meaning-making. Dr. Pearson is developing and studying VTS as a training framework for psychiatry residents, exploring its connections to psychodynamic listening, the psychiatric interview, and Open Dialogue practice.
Haiku and Expressive Therapy: Haiku’s brevity and structural constraints make it uniquely suited to clinical and educational settings: writing a haiku asks only for a moment of attention, and the act of putting experience into poetic form can create distance from difficult emotions. Dr. Pearson has developed and piloted haiku workshops at MGH, McLean Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, and he is developing a structured “bedside haiku” program that brings this practice directly to hospitalized patients.