Narrative Psychiatry and Family Collaborations is about helping families with complex psychiatric problems by seeing and meeting the families and the family members, as the best versions of themselves, before we see and address the diagnoses. This book draws on ten years of clinical research and contains stories about helping people, who are heavily burdened with psychiatric illnesses, to find ways to live a life as close as possible to their dreams. The chapters are organized according to ideas, values, and techniques. The book describes family-oriented practices, narrative collaborative practices, narrative psychiatric practices, and narrative agency practices. It also talks about wonderfulness interviewing, mattering practices, public note taking on paper charts, therapeutic letter writing, diagnoses as externalized problems, narrative medicine, and family community meetings. Each chapter includes case studies that illustrate the theory, ethics, and practice, told by Nina Jørring in collaboration with the families and colleagues. The book will be of interest to child and adolescent psychiatrists and all other mental health professionals working with children and families.

The Art of Narrative Psychiatry is the first book to comprehensively show narrative psychiatry in action. Lively and engaging, it offers psychiatrists and psychotherapists detailed guidance in collaborative narrative approaches to healing.

Unravelling Trauma and Weaving Resilience with Systemic and Narrative Therapy is an innovative book that details how clinicians can engage children, families and their networks in creative and collaborative relationships to elicit change within the context of trauma and violence. Combining systemic, narrative and dialogical theoretical frameworks with clinical examples, this volume focuses on therapeutic conversations that can help children, and those involved with them, deconstruct their experienced difficulties, and create more hopeful stories and alternative ways of relating to one another through a sense of play. Vermeire advocates for serious playfulness as a way of directly addressing trauma and its effects, as well as along ‘trauma-sensitive’ side paths. Puppetry, artwork, interviews and theatre play are used to weave networks of resilience in ever-widening circles and this approach is informed by the awareness that individual problems are always to be seen as relational, social and political. This book is an important read for therapists and social workers who work with traumatised children and their multi-stressed families.

Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives offers a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of narrative therapy. Influenced by feminist, postmodern, and critical theory, this edited volume illustrates how we make sense of our lives and experiences by ascribing meaning through stories that arise within social conversations and culturally available discourses.

Tom Andersen, Harlene Anderson, and Michael White have shaped the landscapes of dialogical, collaborative, and narrative therapies. This unique book archives one of their gatherings and, in the spirit of therapeutic practice, is conversational and captures the presentations and exchanges between the three main contributors and international discussants. Tom Andersen invites us along to navigate the ‘forks in the road’ he faced in his emerging career, and he revisits the development of his pioneering ideas such as reflecting teams. Harlene Anderson paints the picture of her experiences in collaboration with women in Bosnia. Michael White, co-founder of the narrative therapy tradition, then provides a clear example of the frontiers of collaborative post-modern therapies. Through the introduction of the theory and application of Vygotskian ideas Michael excites the reader about what is possible to know and do in a therapeutic conversation.

Showcasing approaches as creative and playful as young clients themselves, the book presents therapy as a dialogue of discovery. Through transcripts and compelling case examples, contributors illuminate how drama, art, play, and humor can be used effectively to engage with children of different ages, and to honor their idiosyncratic language, knowledge, and perspective.

Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has become an established and accepted textbook of child psychiatry. Now completely revised and updated, the fifth edition provides a coherent appraisal of the current state of the field to help trainee and practising clinicians in their daily work. It is distinctive in being both interdisciplinary and international, in its integration of science and clinical practice, and in its practical discussion of how researchers and practitioners need to think about conflicting or uncertain findings. This new edition now offers an entirely new section on conceptual approaches, and several new chapters, including: neurochemistry and basic pharmacology brain imaging health economics psychopathology in refugees and asylum seekers bipolar disorder attachment disorders statistical methods for clinicians This leading textbook provides an accurate and comprehensive account of current knowledge, through the integration of empirical findings with clinical experience and practice, and is essential reading for professionals working in the field of child and adolescent mental health, and clinicians working in general practice and community pediatric settings.