Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences. The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father-daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L'Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a schizophrenic identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students. Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory. Read the chapter Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
ISBN-13
9780889205093
eBay Product ID (ePID)
91437799
Product Key Features
Author
Angela D. Henderson, Connie Canam, Valerie Raoul, Carla Paterson
Publication Name
Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
Psychology, Healthcare System
Publication Year
2007
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
376 Pages
Dimensions
Item Weight
676g
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of Manufacture
Canada
Editor
Carla Paterson, Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson