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.

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.

At the heart of any therapeutic encounter there is always a story. Patients seeking help bring with them stories, spoken or untold, fragmentary and whole, that collectively make up their own personal narrative, their lived autobiography. Whatever else their tasks, a central part of the doctor's or therapist's job is to facilitate the telling of these stories, to make meaning out of them and find the patterns within them. The aim of this book is to rehabilitate stories and story telling within medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy and to consider a narrative approach both as a theoretical paradigm and a practical, therapeutic tool.

Seeks to restore the pivotal role of the patient’s own story in the healing process • Shows how conventional medicine tends to ignore the account of the patient • Presents case histories where disease is addressed and healed through the narrative process • Proposes a reinvention of medicine to include the indigenous healing methods that for thousands of years have drawn their effectiveness from telling and listening Modern medicine, with its high-tech and managed-care approach, has eliminated much of what constitutes the art of healing: those elements of doctoring that go beyond the medications prescribed. The typically brief office visit leaves little time for doctors to listen to their patients, though it is in these narratives that disease is both revealed and perpetuated--and can be released and treated. Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s Narrative Medicine examines the foundations of the indigenous use of story as a healing modality. Citing numerous case histories that demonstrate the profound power of narrative in healing, the author shows how when we learn to dialogue with disease, we come to understand the power of the “story” we tell about our illness and our possibilities for better health. He shows how this approach also includes examining our relationships to our extended community to find any underlying disharmony that may need healing. Mehl-Madrona points the way to a new model of medicine--a health care system that draws its effectiveness from listening to the healing wisdom of the past and also to the present-day voices of its patients.

"Once upon a time, everything was understood through stories....The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that 'if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.'...Stories always dealt with the why' questions. The answers they gave did not have to be literally true; they only had to satisfy people's curiosity by providing an answer, less for the mind than for the soul." --From Chapter 1 Each of us has a story to tell that is uniquely personal and profoundly meaningful. The goal of the modern therapist is to help clients probe deeply enough to find their own voice, describe their experiences, and create a narrative in which a life story takes shape and makes sense. Emphasizing the vital connections among personal experience, family, and community, the authors of this provocative new book explore the role of narrative therapy within the context of a postmodern culture. They employ the interactional dynamics of family therapy to demonstrate how to help people deconstruct oppressive and debilitating perspectives, replace them with liberating and legitimizing stories, and develop a framework of meaning and direction for more intentional, more fulfilling lives. Blending scientific theory with literary aesthetics, Story Re-Visions presents a comprehensive collection of specific narrative therapy techniques, inventions, interviewing guidelines, and therapeutic questions. The book examines the development of the postmodern phenomenon, tracing its evolution across time and disciplines. It discusses paradigmatic traditions, the meaning of modernism, and the ways in which the ancient, binding narratives have lost their power to inspire uncritical assent. Methods for doing narrative therapy in a destoried world are presented, with suggestions for meeting the challenges of postmodern value systems and ethical dilemmas. Numerous case examples and dialogues illustrate ways to help people become authors of their own stories, and each of the last four chapters concludes with an appendix that provides additional information for the practicing clinician. Detailing ways in which a narrative framework enhances family therapy, the authors describe how the therapist and client may act together as revisionary editors, and present techniques for keeping the story re-vision alive, well, and in charge. Finally, the book examines re-vision techniques for clinical training and supervision settings, with discussion of how therapists may help one another create stories about their clients, as well as themselves. Accessibly written and profoundly enlightening, Story Re-Visions is ideal for family therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and anyone else interested in doing therapy from a narrative stance. It is also valuable as supplemental reading for courses in family therapy and other psychotherapeutic disciplines.

Nature and Narrative is the launch volume in a new series of books entitled International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry. The series will aim to build links between the sciences and humanities in psychiatry. Our ability to decipher mental disorders depends to a unique extent on both the sciences and the humanities. Science provides insight into the 'causes' of a problem, enabling us to formulate an 'explanation', and the humanities provide insight into its 'meanings' and helps with our 'understanding'. Psychiatry, if it is to develop as a balanced discipline, must draw on input from both of these spheres. Nature (for causes) and Narrative (for meanings) will help define the series as a whole by touching on a range of issues relevant to this 'border country'. With contributions from an international star-studded cast, representing the field of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, this volume will set the scene for this new interdisciplinary field. This will be of interest to all those with practical experience of mental health issues, whether as providers or as users/consumers of services, as well as to philosophers, social scientists, and bioethicists.

Psychiatry has lagged behind many clinical specialties in recognizing the importance of narrative for understanding and effectively treating disease. With this book, Bradley Lewis makes the challenging and compelling case that psychiatrists need to promote the significance of narrative in their practice as well. Narrative already holds a prominent place in psychiatry. Patient stories are the foundation for diagnosis and the key to managing treatment and measuring its effectiveness. Even so, psychiatry has paid scant scholarly attention to the intrinsic value of patient stories. Fortunately, the study of narrative outside psychiatry has grown exponentially in recent years, and it is now possible for psychiatry to make considerable advances in its appreciation of clinical stories. Narrative Psychiatry picks up this intellectual opportunity and develops the tools of narrative for psychiatry. Lewis explores the rise of narrative medicine and looks closely at recent narrative approaches to psychotherapy. He uses philosophic and fictional writings, such as Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov, to develop key terms in narrative theory (plot, metaphor, character, point of view) and to understand the interpretive dimensions of clinical work. Finally, Lewis brings this material back to psychiatric practice, showing how narrative insights can be applied in psychiatric treatments—including the use of psychiatric medications. Nothing short of a call to rework the psychiatric profession, Narrative Psychiatry advocates taking the inherently narrative-centered patient-psychiatrist relationship to its logical conclusion: making the story a central aspect of treatment.