Publication details
Healing Stories; Integrative psychotherapy for psychosomatic problems
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2006 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Within interdisciplinary efforts to promote more complex, biopsychosocial perspective in medicine, a metaphor of story and narrative became a major interest for many practitioners and researchers. In mental health, a growing number of therapists started to pay attention to patients narratives as an important resource for both understanding and therapy process. Patients narratives and story reconstruction has been considered essential vehicles for positive change. Stories dominating a client life, which developed around an intractable problem or significant relationships, became a central focus of narrative-informed psychotherapy or family therapy. Narrating the experience and multiple perspectives of family members may enhance the understanding and reflection upon different meanings of behaviour of a person with mental illness or so called psychosomatic problems. Unlike the prevailing trend of categorization and medicalisation in mental health that sustains monological ways of treatment, the narrative approach may promote the dialogical interaction and collaboration between a therapist and a client or a family. Taking patients narratives into account within psychosocial perspective is a necessary condition for improving both quality of care and quality of life. |