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Introduction: Social anxiety is a common experience. For some it is a debilitating, chronic difficulty, which becomes problematic during childhood and can have devastating effects. Talking therapies are useful for many, particularly in reducing anxiety. However, many people never access treatment and for those that do, therapies do not tend to improve their quality of life, particularly their social worlds. Do we need to look beyond clinical recovery measures when assessing therapeutic outcomes? There has been no research that has explored personal recovery in social anxiety. This thesis seeks to understand whether people with problematic social anxiety experience personal recovery and if so, how. Methods: A participatory action research (PAR) approach was used to develop the project. People with problematic social anxiety advised on study design, data collection, analysis and dissemination of the findings. 8 narratives of living with problematic social anxiety were collected to explore how people negotiate social anxiety and what this can tell us about personal recovery. A narrative analysis was then carried out, drawing upon Frank’s (1995, 2012) dialogical narratives analysis of illness stories and Adame and Hornstein’s (2006) typology of emotional distress narratives. Findings: The participants’ stories of living with problematic social anxiety highlighted the variety of ways that people make sense of this difficulty. The types of stories told were reminiscent of Frank’s (1995, 2010) illness narratives, as people told stories of restitution, chaos and quest. People drew upon traditional, counter and alternative mental health narratives to negotiate social anxiety, reminding us of the multiple ways people can find to overcome emotional distress. Discussion: The PAR study showed how people struggling with a mental health difficulty can be at the centre of research which strives to better understand their struggles and improve talking therapies. The study reminds us that the “social” aspects of social anxiety need to be better acknowledged within therapies so that we do not only focus on reducing anxiety but help people improve their relationships and quality of life.

As part of a preliminary literature review of research concerning the relationship between medical anthropology and bioethics committees, it became clear that Institutional Review Boards, a foundational component of research, had never been evaluated as a population with a characterizable identity. Some examples of contextual critiques and policy analysis with the goal of procedural efficiency were accessible (Gunsalus 2006; Fitzgerald 2009; Lederman 2006; Ozdemir 2009; Sontag 2012), but qualitative data on the local knowledge of IRBs as a population do not exist. A synthesis of theoretical orientations and methodological planning have been integrated to inform these novel research questions to learn more about the ethical decision-making process of an Institutional Review Board within a research university and hospital. Bioethical reasoning grounded in Western morals creates enough opportunity for cognitive dissonance because of the potential misapplication of ethics, but when decision-making authority is deemed objectively scientific, it can cause a power dynamic by being taken as self-evident. Considering these biomedical frameworks, research with human subjects is grounded in morality, making IRBs a relevant site of praxis for philosophical and scientific research. The overall purpose of this project is to identify the ethical values that define Institutional Review Boards as a population, evaluate the moral implications of biomedical governmentality in clinical research, and define common phenomenological understandings of moral praxis within positions of relative power.