Gut Feelings: Challenging Crip Gut Stigma

Órla Meadhbh Murray introduces the Gut Feelings course: a space for people to narrate, explore, and challenge their experience of gut symptoms.

Do you get an upset stomach when you are stressed or anxious? What does it mean to listen to your gut? What can your gut tell you about your feelings?

These were the kinds of questions we began to think through during a 3-week Gut Feelings course I ran at ReCoCo, a mental health recovery college in Newcastle upon Tyne, in September and October 2024. Initially the Gut Feelings course was made up of three structured workshops and consisted of providing information about gut conditions, alongside a variety of creative activities for participants to tell the story of their gut health and mental health together. This turned into a monthly peer support group at ReCoCo, which provides an unstructured drop-in space for people to talk about different experiences of gut distress, to build community across different gut experiences and diagnoses, and to challenge stigma around discussing gut symptoms.

More broadly, ReCoCo provides peer support for various aspects of mental health and wellbeing through courses, workshops, and drop-in groups. They host art, music, and exercise classes alongside courses on different aspects of mental distress and potential therapeutic approaches. Through an ongoing collaboration between ReCoCo and Durham University’s Wellcome-funded Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities (DRP-MH), I became involved in ReCoCo as a student and volunteer facilitator. The DRP-MH provided funding for a pilot research project looking into creative methods (discussed below) for narrating the connections between gut health and mental health. This resulted in the creation of the Gut Feelings course, which was intended for up to 12 participants, with numbers fluctuating week to week, alongside follow-up interviews with four participants to reflect on their experiences of the course. As mentioned above, the Gut Feelings course involved three workshops which ReCoCo students could sign up for to learn more about gut health and take part in creative activities for examining gut health and mental health.

The gut is often called a ‘second brain’ (Gershon, 1999) with increasing scientific research looking into the gut-brain axis (Anderson, Cryan and Dinan, 2017; Scarlata and Riehl, 2024). Gut conditions like Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) are on the rise globally (Richardson, 2024, p. 13), with at least 1 in 123 people affected by IBD in the UK (IBD UK, 2024, p. 11). IBD is a “chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract … [involving] an exaggerated immune response to a normal stimulus, such as food and intestinal flora” (McDowell, Farooq and Haseeb, 2023) which often results in symptoms of abdominal pain, persistent diarrhoea, blood in your stool, persistent tiredness, and unexplained weight loss (NHS, 2023).

An Origin Story: My Experience of IBD and Stoma Surgery

I became interested in the relationship between the gut and feelings due to my own gut and mental health experiences. In 2020 I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis – one of two main types of IBD – and had semi-elective surgery to remove my colon and create an ileostomy:  a type of stoma, whereby the small intestine is diverted through a surgically produced hole in the abdomen over which a stoma bag is attached (NHS, 2022; Trio Healthcare, nd). Prior to this, I had a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). Having both of these meant my gut symptoms – primarily persistent abdominal pain, sensitivity to certain foods, persistent tiredness, persistent diarrhoea, alongside migraines and mouth ulcers when I had particularly bad flare ups – were often written off as ‘just stress’ or ‘just IBS’.

Many people with gut conditions experience late diagnosis due to not being taken seriously by doctors (Vidali, 2013; Dryden, 2022b). This is perhaps due to the stigma and shame attached to discussing gut symptoms, particularly given the centrality of the toilet and shit. As Cindy LaCom highlights “Shit is filthy, and it represents contagion in ways that many physical and cognitive disabilities do not” (LaCom, 2007, p. 2). Jane Dryden’s feminist philosophical work on the gut similarly highlights how it can be seen as unprofessional, rude, or impolite to discuss these conditions due to the social taboo around bowel habits and shit (Dryden, 2022a). Shame and stigma make it harder for people to ask for help, to seek medical care, and to get the support they need at work, in education, or just to leave the house due to the lack of public toilets. With IBD and IBS, patients’ perceived stigma about their illnesses negatively impacts their mental health and wellbeing, as well as clinical outcomes (Taft et al., 2011). I am interested in challenging the stigma and shame attached to gut conditions by conducting research and publicly talking about my own experience (e.g. Murray, 2025); these form the basis for the Gut Feelings project.

The Research Project: Gut Feelings

I am interested in gut distress and how people navigate it, whether through formal diagnosis and medical treatment or not. I use the term ‘crip guts’ – “non-normative digestive processing, nutritional disabilities or other disabilities related to the gut” (Kolářová, Stöckelová and Senft, 2023, p. 1255) – to acknowledge and build crip kinship across multiple gut experiences. By crip kinship I mean intentional community building between disabled people. As Shayda Kafai explains “Crip kinship is a network of reciprocity, a relationality that brings us closer to one another” (Kafai, 2021, p. np; Budworth, 2025, p. 29). My focus on building community across different gut conditions is an appreciation that the social and institutional barriers we face are similar, even if our symptoms, diagnoses, and life experiences are different. The need for quick access to toilets, pain and discomfort around digesting, the invisibility of gut-related chronic illnesses and/or disabilities, and the stigma and silence often attached to gut-related distress are common experiences across gut conditions.

My approach is rooted in Alison Kafer’s (2013) political/relational model of disability. Kafer identifies the ‘problem’ of disability in the social structures and environment that exclude and stigmatise certain experiences. She also holds the complexity of disabled people’s relationships to medical institutions as sites of potentially life-saving treatment as well as sites of violence and discrimination. By focusing on crip guts through this political/relational lens, I seek to reframe individualised private, and often stigmatised, experiences of gut distress into collective coalition building across different gut conditions. My aim with the Gut Feelings course and peer support group is to create a crip gut community and destigmatise talking about our crip guts.

The ReCoCo Peer Support Group

One of the methods we used in the Gut Feelings course was using Dixit cards to answer two questions: What is the story of your gut? How do your gut symptoms or gut condition(s) make you feel? Dixit is a card-based board game with visual picture cards, often showing fairytale-like images, that are used to tell stories.

There is a small literature discussing the use of Dixit cards in research (Mattheoudakis and Panteliou, 2023; Atherton, Dawson and Cross, 2025). However, my decision to use them came from my former psychotherapist who had used Dixit cards to facilitate discussion. I used Dixit cards to help participants tell the story of their guts beyond medical jargon or diagnosis, aiming to get at the hard-to-describe feelings, the physical everyday experiences of living with gut conditions, and sometimes the metaphorical or magical readings of bodies and experiences.

During the course, I asked students to choose three or more Dixit cards to think through the story of their gut in response to different prompts: e.g. ‘three different moments in the life of your gut’. In each subsequent Gut Feelings monthly drop-in group, I also used the Dixit cards to facilitate ‘check ins’ regarding how people were feeling about their guts or to help new members visually tell their gut story.

In the final workshop of the 3-week Gut Feelings course, we were joined by academic David Martin who led a series of body mapping activities. These involved participants telling the story of their guts in ways which did not require details or even putting the experience into words. One body mapping activity involved participants drawing and putting stickers onto paper t-shirts and trousers to indicate where they felt pain in their bodies. Together we also created a collective toilet map of Newcastle, identifying accessible and not so accessible public toilets to collectivise our crip gut knowledge and create a useful resource for the group.

Conclusion: Initial Findings and Ongoing Peer Support

The 3-week Gut Feelings course and subsequent monthly drop-in group at ReCoCo provides a space to talk about gut distress beyond medical frameworks, focusing on creating crip gut community across different gut experiences. The focus on gut experiences in general aimed to include those who have not yet received a formal diagnosis and to identify similarities across different gut symptoms particularly around stigma and other social and institutional issues for those with crip guts. The emphasis on narrating our own gut experiences through creative activities helped to identify common experiences of stigmatisation, late (or lack of) diagnosis, not being believed by medical professionals, and the weird and wonderful ways we make sense of, and find humour in, our crip guts.

The Gut Feelings course and drop-in group functions as a less hierarchical peer support environment, providing a supportive place beyond the doctor’s office to discuss gut experiences together and begin to challenge the stigma which surrounds crip guts. Some initial findings from the pilot project were that participants wanted more accessible medical information on the up-to-date gut science to inform their self-care and self-treatment in the absence of sufficient specialist medical support and the daily complexities of managing symptoms and implementing medical advice. While medical advice was beyond my expertise as a sociologist, it demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary work around the gut and more publicly accessible medical and scientific information, such as the excellent online resources produced by Guts UK and their newly launched helpline. The common experience of not being taken seriously around gut symptoms, particularly if one has a pre-existing mental health diagnosis, was also a common theme which needs further research, particularly how this intersects with other forms of inequality.

If you are interested in hearing more about this project or getting involved, please contact Órla Meadhbh Murray – orla.murray@northumbria.ac.uk.

About the author

Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/ they) is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University Newcastle, Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and co-founder of the Institutional Ethnography Network. Their current project, Gut Feelings, focuses on queer feminist approaches to the gut, having previously focused on inequalities in higher education including a recent monograph University Audit Cultures and Feminist Praxis: An Institutional Ethnography (2025). The Gut Feelings pilot research at ReCoCo discussed in this article was funded in whole by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number 226798/Z/22/Z].

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