This book elucidates how narrative identity is crucial to understanding mental illness and personal recovery. It analyses over 100 personal stories shared by individuals with mental illness, and provides guidance to facilitate recovery. Useful for mental health researchers and professionals as well as individuals experiencing mental illness.
This book contains excerpts of life stories from 118 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and major depressive disorder. This library of personal narratives, heavily reproduced and quoted throughout the text, presents a composite image of the ways in which narrative identity can be äected by mental illness while also being a resource for personal recovery. Those researching, studying, or practicing in mental health professions will ¿nd a wealth of humanizing ¿rst-person perspectives on mental illness that foster perspective-taking and aid patient-centered treatment and study. Researchers of narrative psychology will ¿nd a unique set of life stories synthesized with existing literature on identity and recovery. Moving toward intervention, the authors include a 'guide for narrative repair' with the aim of healing narrative identity damage and fostering growth of adaptive narrative identity.