Narrative Therapy and Elders with Memory Loss

Elders with memory loss often experience anxiety and depression as they feel their identities slip out of their own control. The paper argues that narrative therapy can help people with dementia revise their stories and reclaim their identities as their personal histories become less accessible to them. The paper presents case examples in which unique outcomes emerged when elders with memory loss resisted the cultural imperative to perceive their lives in sequential order and instead emphasized character traits and thematic patterns in their stories. The paper recommends ways to adapt narrative therapy so elders can create a meaningful sense of self despite dementia.     

Quiet please, there's a lady on stage: : Centering the person with dementia in life story narrative

This paper is drawn from a larger study based on traditional qualitative thematic methods, which explored the use of secondary biographical stories as a strategy in conversation with an older person who has dementia. The aim of this paper is to re-examine the data to facilitate further discussion in gerontology about the ways in which the ideals of Kitwood's (1997) personhood and narrative inquiry can be used keep life story of the person with dementia intact. By drawing upon narrative writers such as Mishler (1986), Gee (1991), Ramanathan (1995) and Riessman (2004, 2007), we describe a methodological approach utilising structural and thematic forms of narrative analysis to keep the person with dementia ‘centre stage’ in their own life story narrative. This paper demonstrates that by integrating a person-centred approach to interpretative and structural narrative analysis, people living with dementia can be the centre of their own story and communicate with their community what is important and why it is worth telling.     

Family therapy: An orientation

Conclusion The family therapist is an active, involved therapist. He must be emotionally lithe and resilient, prepared to deal with, or deal out, the unexpected. His challenge is to learn to use his own impulses and reactions in a way that the family can use to understand themselves better. He makes use also of any people and resources in the family's environment which might be of help to them. There are some basic techniques and orienting principles available to the family therapist, and it is these which it has been the task of this paper to set forth. Beyond these, the responsibility rests with each family therapist to comprehend himself and his place in his own family, and then to use his creativity to transform what he knows and what he feels into a form which can be used by the families he treats in their development.     

Setting the House on Fire: The Melbourne Interview With Salvador Minuchin

Brian Stagoll interviewed Minuchin via satellite in front of a conference plenary audience at the Inaugural Pan Pacific Family Therapy Congress in Melbourne, 2001. Minuchin looks back over his working life, and weaves the various leaders of the family therapy field in the US into an ‘American Quilt’. He also responds to questions about his own impact on the field, and his prediction that by 2000, family therapy would be triumphant.     

The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics: An Interview with Bruce Perry

In this interview with Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, Senior Fellow of The Child Trauma Academy, Laurie MacKinnon discusses with Dr Perry developmental trauma and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, an approach to clinical problem solving that utilises a developmental lens and incorporates advances in neurobiological development. Dr Perry gives his perspective on the causal connection between childhood abuse and later psychiatric diagnosis, the child's contact with a violent parent post‐separation, the importance of interventions that address the organisation and functioning of lower parts of the brain and his perspective on the use and limitations of psychotropic medications, cognitive behaviour therapy and family therapy.     

Family Therapy: Out from Behind the Hero Narrative

Schools of family therapy have been highly selective in their presentation of the theory/practice nexus. Family therapy's method of teaching (the infamous workshop format) has hampered it's growth as a practice and academic discipline. An inadvertent, unhelpful legacy of Gregory Bateson has been that lesser scholars have aped his capacity to draw on other fields of knowledge without his rigour, or his propriety. Family therapy's cavalier dealings with bodies of knowledge and its reliance on miraculous case studies has resulted in the bypassing of individual suffering. The heroic narrative that has dominated family therapy has precluded other styles of stories for therapists, theorists and clients. Family therapy has been dominated by the myth of the hero, with its accompanying motif of the puer eternus (the eternal youth). Family therapy has been forever reinventing itself, forever the ‘new kid on the block’. This fascination with newness has interfered with family therapy's capacity, at times, to consolidate its genuine value as a therapeutic entity.     

Factors affecting user participation for elderly people with dementia living at home: a critical interpretive synthesis of the literature

ABSTRACT

Professional caregivers are expected to facilitate user participation for people with dementia. At the same time, an increasing number of elderly people with dementia are now being cared for at their homes. Research is scarce on user participation for people with dementia, especially for people with dementia who live at home. This article aims to systematically and critically review the factors affecting user participation for elderly people with dementia living at home from the viewpoint of the patients, family caregivers, professional caregivers and researchers. A systematic literature search and critical interpretive synthesis were conducted. The search yielded 1,957 articles. In total, 112 full-text articles were retrieved, of which 27 met the inclusion criteria. Five broad analytical themes were identified during the analysis: individual characteristics, professional caregiver characteristics, decision characteristics, relational characteristics and organisational characteristics. The results show that the value placed on user participation can differ between family caregivers and professional caregivers. People with dementia still experience stigmatisation, preventing user participation, and relations with both family and professional caregivers play a key role in enabling user participation for people with dementia.     

Interviewing Ron Perry: Keeping the Conversation Going

Throughout his long career in counselling and family therapy, Ron Perry has seen enormous ups and downs in the field. He studied with, and worked alongside, family therapy masters such as Virginia Satir, Jay Haley, MRI and the Milan team and his dedication to counselling and psychotherapy culminated in an Order of Australia medal in 2005. In this conversation, Ron provides an intimate understanding of family therapy emphasising the value of teams and interventions that achieve good outcomes for families.     

In the Right Place at The Right Time: An Interview with Brian Stagoll

Few in Australia have done more than Brian Stagoll to develop and critique a local family therapy within an international context, to define its political and intellectual challenges, and to give the field organisational substance. He has been at the centre of Australian family therapy for more than two decades, as both creator and iconoclast. Brian is a psychiatrist who has always pursued social justice and community health initiatives along with a busy life as a therapist, and is a keen reader of history, politics, philosophy and literature. He was a co‐founder of our annual conferences. He co‐founded and organised the Williams Road Summer Schools in the 1980s. He was a co‐founder of this journal, its first Associate Editor and book review editor. He has contributed some of our most significant papers, as well as publishing elsewhere nationally and internationally. He was influential as a Board member and later as President. He is an Honorary Life Member of VAFT, which he co‐founded, and in 2001 he received — in his home city of Melbourne — the Journal Award for outstanding contributions to family therapy.     

David R. Maines: Embedding Symbolic Interactionism at the Heart of Sociology

David R. Maines was a key founder of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and a champion of symbolic interactionist sociology. Maines fought against characterizations of symbolic interactionism as astructural and “subjectivist.” He was adamant that symbolic interactionism offered vital perspectives on the study of social structure and organization, and that it was compatible with a variety of research methods. He played a vital role in developing narrative sociology and bringing narrative scholarship from communication studies to sociological audiences. In this retrospective on his life and career, I detail what Maines saw as the five central features of symbolic interactionism: (1) interpretation and meaning, (2) communication, (3) temporality and process, (4) agency, and (5) dialectical thinking. I then examine four interrelated themes of Maines' sociological contributions: (1) temporality, (2) debunking myths about interactionism, (3) mesostructure, and (4) narrative sociology. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/YodjvXbo51Q .     

Living with dementia in rural and remote Scotland: Diverse experiences of people with dementia and their carers

There is a lack of research into people's experiences of using services as dementia sufferers themselves, or because they care for someone with dementia, in rural areas. This article explores their experiences in the context of rural Scotland, drawing on data gathered from both people with dementia and their carers. Our research suggests that understanding the nuanced and co-constituted experience of dementia in rural communities is a pre-requisite for improving service provision. The paper explores the way in which participants linked their experiences to their spatial location in rural areas. Our findings suggest that participants used a narrative of idealised rurality which linked together interwoven and overlapping social networks, a physical relationship with place and a sense of self sufficiency. However, the participants’ stories also highlighted the diversity in experiences as service users between places, suggesting a disjunction between the generalising narrative of the rural idyll and their particular situations. These findings extend the literature on rural mental health issues and on the experience of dementia in particular, in turn helping to inform place and person centred policies.     

Getting my stories straight: A narrativist in quest of congruence

Drawing on his work in the area of narrative gerontology, the author reflects on the measure of congruence that exists between the theories he has been developing about the storied complexity of adult development and his lived experience as an aging individual himself. His reflections include a discussion of his former career as a parish minister and his ongoing passion for “the writing life”. He concludes with some speculation on the possibility of combining his interests in narrative and aging with his continuing interest in theological themes.     

Poverty over the family life cycle

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics is used to investigate vulnerability to poverty over the family life cycle. An examination of 1981–83 interview years reveals that family life cycle stage is a significant predictor of poverty status. Two-parent families are more vulnerable to poverty in the childbearing stage, and also when they are launching children. Female-headed families are more vulnerable to poverty when younger children are present in the household. Reasons for these different vulnerabilities to poverty are given, and the implications of these findings are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1987 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society. I would like to thank Joan Aldous, David Klein and Rodney Ganey for their reviews of this paper.Robert C. Tuttle is an assistant professor, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Wilkes College, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and includes the economic situations of families, and family policy among his research interests.     

“Ours is the Strangest Situation,Ours is Different from Most Peoples”: Spousal Caregiver Perspectives on the Complex Challenges of Dementia Caregiving in Late-Life Marriage

The relationship between the person with dementia with family caregivers is a key factor in maintaining a sense of self and personhood. Spousal caregiving in particular can create a world of shared meaning, and in the context of the presence of cognitive decline in one spouse, couple hood is essential to a full understanding of how spouses live with and respond to the impact of dementia. While much research has focused on the strengths of long-term married couples caring for a spouse with dementia, there is currently little research on how dementia impacts couples in late-life marriage. This qualitative case study focusses on two female caregivers in late-life marriages negotiating the challenges of caregiving for a spouse with dementia. Spouse 1 returned to live with her ex-husband in order to care for him through his dementia journey and they recently remarried. Spouse 2 married a close friend of the family prior to his dementia diagnosis. While participant shared perspectives include: (1) family dynamics, (2) isolation, (3) financial concerns, and (4) acceptance of their role in their spouse’s dementia journey, their long-term outlooks are divergent due to the complexity of their motives for entering in to late-life marriage.     

To Live More Comfortably with Difference An Interview with Peter Churven

Peter Churven's name has been associated with family therapy in Australia since the early days. He is remembered as the original Director of Redbank House (which pioneered whole family admissions), and for his forceful presence as the Foundation President of the N.S.W. Family Therapy Association. He was recently elected as a member of the Board for this journal. As you read his words, imagine him now and then pausing to think, swivelling in his chair, so that the creaking acts as punctuation.     

‘Big Society’ in the UK: A Policy Review

Alongside the UK Coalition Government’s historic public spending cuts, the ‘Big Society’ has become a major narrative in UK political discourse. This article reviews key features of Big Society policies against their aims of rebalancing the economy and mending ‘Broken Britain’, with particular reference to their implications for children and young people, and for the voluntary and community sector working with them. Although many positives are acknowledged, flaws are identified in the lack of attention paid to the unique position of children in society, and in an inconsistent conceptualisation of the voluntary sector on which Big Society policies rely.     

Schizophrenia and Family Therapy

The case presented is of a young man hospitalized twice for schizophrenic disorder before the commencement of family therapy. The therapy which dealt with the family system, specific pathological communication patterns and intra-psychic conflicts, is discussed. As the parents of the young man confronted their inter- and intra-personal problems, the function of his illness disappeared, along with his psychotic symptoms. While demonstrating the process of psychotherapy, the thesis that psychotic decompensation in young people often signifies severe family dysfunction is also presented. Accepting the ‘identified’ patient as such and ignoring the family dynamics may serve to create a chronic schizophrenic illness.     

乐享“就地过年” 感受京城年味儿

布鲁斯?康诺利是一位来自英国的作家、摄影师。他在中国生活了35年,几乎走遍了中国的大江南北,见证了中国改革开放以来所发生的巨大变化。本文中他分享了在北京就地过年的愉快经历。