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.

Psychiatry that recognizes the essential role of community in creating a new story of mental health • Provides a critique of conventional psychiatry and a look at what mental health care could be • Includes stories used in the author’s healing practice that draw from traditional cultures around the world Conventional psychiatry is not working. The pharmaceutical industry promises it has cures for everything that ails us, yet a recent study on antidepressants showed there is no difference of success in prescribed pharmaceuticals from placebos when all FDA-reported trials are considered instead of just the trials published in journals. Up to 80 percent of patients with bipolar depression remain symptomatic despite conventional treatment, and 10 to 20 percent of these patients commit suicide. In Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to “fix” them. What needs “fixing” is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. He shows how this innovative approach is actually more compatible with what we are learning about the biology of the brain and genetics than the conventional model of psychiatry. Drawing on wisdom both ancient and new, he demonstrates the power and success of narrative psychiatry to bring forth change and lasting transformation.

This unique title richly tells the stories of partnership and collaboration. The narrative voice of each chapter derives from the people who tell their story -- immigrants, survivors of torture, mental health experts, urban people, rural people, teachers, doctors, attorneys, students and international leaders. These authors provide emotionally powerful tales that move, affect and encourage readers. The collection of narratives is inspired by these individuals, who believe that collaboration can bring authentic mutualism, promise-keeping and innovation to address the hardest problems we face as a world community. Partnerships for Mental Health: Narratives of Community and Academic Collaboration is about the stories of innovation and collaboration occurring between community and academic partners who have undertaken among the very hardest of problems – such as the care of veterans with ravaging posttraumatic stress disorder; the care of homeless individuals with HIV, addiction and mental illness; the care of caregivers for Hispanic family members with Alzheimer’s disease; the prevention of illness in impoverished vulnerable youth; and the rescue of profoundly mentally ill earthquake survivors. In addition, this title not only also tells the story of identity formation of early-career physicians with a calling to work with distinct populations for whom suffering and stigma are immense, but also the stories of the special bonds that develop and are strengthened between community members and academic colleagues and ultimately, between friends. A truly indispensable contribution to the literature, this captivating and novel title illustrates and inspires collaboration in order to bring about better health outcomes for people affected by mental health issues in communities throughout the world.

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.