The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions

Use these fascinating first-person accounts to bring real-world problems into the classroom!The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions: A Teaching Casebook is a collection of personal narratives, short stories, and poetry about mental illness and other life-affecting problems, mostly in the context of family life. Each selection is accompanied by questions for discussion; selected reading lists are provided with each chapter. Beginning with problems related to childhood, the stories range through adolescence, adulthood, and old age. This unique book provides students and educators in psychology, social work, and counseling with an in-depth understanding of various mental illnesses and psychosocial problems through the life cycle. Its stories and narratives give students the unique opportunity to experience "from the inside" what it is like to live with an eating disorder or struggle with a compulsion phobia. The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions is more than a teaching tool. These stories are more than thought provoking, more than simply insightful. They are truly fascinating--each a candid, no-holds-barred glimpse into the personal reality of its narrator--and will inspire the kind of discussions that the best courses and instructors are remembered for. Your students will most likely have finished the book before the class has finished discussing the first chapter! With The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions, your students will explore: - family relationships under various types of stress - how families cope with physical illness - what happens to the family when a loved one struggles with mental illness - the impact of racial issues - the effects of sexual abuse and domestic violence - the process of healing from childhood trauma . . . and much more! The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions provides first-hand knowledge of what the loss of a parent to death, mental illness, or alcoholism feels like to the child; of how "coming out" as a lesbian affects one's life; of the love and frustration of having a mentally handicapped sibling; of what it's like to lose one's memory in old age. No academic description can convey the feelings, meaning, and effects on the individual or family of mental illness or other psychosocial stressors. Only narratives and stories based on direct experience--exactly what you'll find in The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions--can offer this perspective.

Jessica K Heriot, Eileen J Polinger

Contents - About the Editors - Contributors - Foreword - Preface - Acknowledgments - Part I: Childhood - The Killing Jar - My Tenth Year - Land Where Our Fathers Died - The Orange Coat - Wanderer - Learning - Mother's Savage Wait; Someone Else's Making - A Father's Love - Lisa's Ritual, Age Ten - Willie and Winston - Two Mean Boys - Part II: Adolescence - Bonfires - Double Fuselage Model - Liberty Seventeen - Drive - Soldier Boy - Part III: Family Relationships in Adulthood - On Not Being Seen - Mother Stew - Coffee - Elaine - Daddy's Girls - Coffee, 7 a.m. - Cigarettes - Paper Plates - The Answer Is: Grocery Bags - Downstairs Apartment - The Gravity Machine - Part IV: Other Issues of Adulthood - The Invisibility Syndrome - Against the Odds - Hag - Telling Mr. M. - Dance Away - The Self Family - Part V: Physical Illness - When I Was Old - Beauty Shop - The Price of Admission - Stroke - Dear Doctor - What If? - When Your Surgeon Is the Muse - Part VI: Surviving and Healing Childhood Trauma - The Ring of Truth - Letter to Margaret - Hurt - A Sharp Feel - Sacrifice - Part VII: Mental Disorders - Anxiety Disorders - The Color of Disorder - Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back - Prone to Panic - Going to Pieces - Through the Woods, Darkly - Mood Disorders - Karen - Dry Dock - Mad Colored Woman: A Memoir of Manic Depression - Madwoman: A Mental Health Professional Living with Mental Illness - Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders - The Sleep of Reason - Searching the Headlights - Dissociative Disorders - Dissociative Identity Disorder - A Narrative of Survival - Eating Disorders - The Shape of Things - Two Raisinets and a Corn Flake - Substance Abuse - That Goddamed Van Gogh - I Lost You to Liquor - Mother We're Going for a Ride - Diagnosis Problems - Look So Normal - In Search of a Diagnosis - Part VIII: Families Coping with Mental Illness - Fear - Mary and John - The Fool on the Hill - Just Wondering; Sometimes I Pretend You're Dead - Hostages - The Pass - Shocking Mother: A Memoir of Mental Illness and Recovery - My Mother Is Back - All Good Things Happen Below the Belt - Part IX: Practice in an Imperfect System - Rose Cottage - One Flew East, One Flew West - At the Bottom of the Ocean: Remembering the Psych Ward - Kaiser Mental Health--1998 - Caseworker; This One; Case Summary: Homer Human - Juniper and the Balance of Life - The Women's Group - Part X: Old Age - From the Perspective of the Elderly Persons - Time's Winged Chariot - Old Age - Cerebral Dust - From the Perspective of the Caretaker - Growing Old in an Alien Land - With Respect to Reba - Peaches - Sounds - Flying Time