Anna Benedict ’21

Major: Neuroscience and Behavior

Suppl. Major: English

Fighting mental health stigma through the power of storytelling

As an undergraduate inspired to merge her passions for mental health advocacy and storytelling during the COVID-19 pandemic, Anna Benedict ’21 applied her interdisciplinary skillset to create the Our Stories Project (OSP). OSP partners university students with adults navigating serious mental illness (SMI) at Clubhouse psychosocial recovery centers to co-write Clubhouse members’ life stories and later publish them in a book. Now a clinical psychology Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, Benedict is advancing research on narrative identity and resilience in people with SMI, particularly psychosis. 

Leading the project three times so far, Benedict and OSP have educated future healthcare leaders, built allyships with and empowered a vulnerable community, and fought stigma around SMI through three published books of lived narratives, impacting nearly 200 students and Clubhouse members. The books have raised thousands for Clubhouse communities, received international translation requests, and been used in graduate courses. The Clubhouse in South Bend is adapting stories from the book into a play for educational use to fight stigma around SMI. In collaboration with Clubhouse International, Benedict is currently developing OSP into a curriculum for global use.

Benedict has turned OSP and her commitment to valuing each person’s humanity into the foundation of her academic career. In the first year of her doctoral studies, she was accepted to present at three international conferences. Her work centers on strength-based recovery and addresses epistemic injustices by including own-voices narratives and mixed-methods research. Benedict is completing a Community Engagement Certificate and aims to continue lifting the voices of those marginalized by SMI and socioeconomic hardship to build more effective, whole-person-oriented approaches to mental healthcare.

Benedict graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with degrees in neuroscience and behavior and English with an honors concentration in creative writing as a Trustey Family Scholar and Glynn Family Honors student. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she researched in two psychology labs and won four English department awards, including Outstanding Creative Writing Student in 2021. Since then, her work has focused on the intersection of storytelling, advocacy, and mental health.