Meet the Speaker: Anna Benedict ’21

Anna Benedict ’21 graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021, having double-majored in Neuroscience and Behavior (B.S.) and English with an honors concentration in Creative Writing. As a student, she was a Trustey Merit and Glynn Scholar, cum laude graduate, researcher in two psychology labs, and winner of four English department awards—including top creative writer in her class. Since then, her work has focused on the intersection of storytelling, advocacy, and mental health.

Filling a need for connection brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, as a senior Anna founded the Our Stories Project (OSP), which draws from her unique interdisciplinary skillset and partners university students with adults with serious mental illness (SMI) at Clubhouse psychosocial recovery centers to co-write Clubhouse members’ life stories and publish them in a book. 

Anna has led the project three times so far. OSP has educated future healthcare leaders, built allyships with and empowered a vulnerable community, and fought stigma around SMI through three published books of lived narratives. The project has impacted nearly 200 students and Clubhouse members; the books have reached hundreds, 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. Anna is currently developing OSP into a curriculum for global use, in collaboration with Clubhouse International.

Now a Clinical Psychology PhD student at Michigan State University, Anna has turned OSP into the foundation of her academic career. She researches narrative identity and resilience in people with SMI, particularly psychosis, and is completing a Community Engagement Certificate. Driven by a deep valuing of every person’s humanity, her work centers on strengths-based recovery and addresses epistemic injustices by including own-voices narratives in mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) research. In her first year alone, she was accepted to present at three international conferences. Anna hopes to continue melding her creative, academic, and advocacy worlds, lifting the voices of those marginalized by serious mental illness and socioeconomic hardship to build more effective, whole-person-oriented approaches to mental healthcare.