Narrative Psychiatry and Family Therapy: Promoting Resilience and Collaboration with Persons with Intense Mental and Emotional Experiences at Risk of Causing Violence

Narrative psychiatry identifies meaning‐making as a primal force in our lives and guides family therapists and psychiatrists in cultivating narratives of resilience that support safety and wellbeing when working with families in which a member is dealing with intense mental and emotional experiences and may be at risk of causing violence. These contexts are fraught with implications about power, control, identity, and ethical responsibilities of care for those consulting with us and for the wider community. Offering benefits distinct from pathology‐focused psychiatric practice, narrative psychiatry applies the practices of narrative therapy in psychiatric contexts, focusing on strengths and meaning and honouring how values, intentions, and commitments compel and constrain our actions. Illustrated by case conversations, this paper describes five key practices of narrative psychiatry, including emotional attunement, understanding the person without the problem, externalising problems, creating narratives of resilience, and collaborative treatment planning. It shows how narrative psychiatry facilitates risk reduction through helping a person identify values and narratives that support non‐violence and strengthening abilities, relationships and resources that help them stay true to this commitment. Practical ways that family therapists and psychiatrists can use conversations about resources, including medicines, to deconstruct damaging discourses and generate narratives of resilience are described. Discussion is offered about how narrative psychiatry can support clinicians in ethically negotiating clinical dilemmas in which the preferences of the person or family are in conflict with the clinician's ethical and legal duty to protect life.     

Working with Women Associated with Bikie Gangs: Practice Dilemmas

Abstract

Much has been written about bikie gangs, but there is little about the women and children who are part of gang life. The present paper describes domestic violence agency social workers’ ethical practice dilemmas when assisting women who have left bikie gangs to search for a new, safer lifestyle away from the gang culture of drug use and violence, in particular sexual violence. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical processes and issues in resolving such practice dilemmas.     

The role of narrative in public relations ethics pedagogy

Competence in ethical decision making is one of the most important issues in the industry and practice of public relations, yet professionals entering the discipline overestimate their knowledge and skills related to ethical principles. This article features a pedagogical approach to strengthen ethics education in public relations through the use of collaborative student-professional ethics narratives. This technique attempts to move beyond a traditional case study approach and transcend traditional classroom boundaries through the development of narratives featuring real ethics situations experienced by public relations professionals. The project involved the development, implementation and assessment of the pedagogical approach that required students to interview local communication professionals (mostly in public relations) and to craft narratives that explore ethical dilemmas these professionals faced. Pre- and post-test surveys and group feedback helped explore the impact of narrative inquiry in helping students internalize ethical lessons.     

Becoming Resilient: Overturning Common Sense — Part 1

How might we engage with the concept resilience in a world obsessed with the measurement and cataloguing of deficits and virtues alike; with predicting outcomes, producing certainty and the reification of stable identity? This article is based on a plenary address presented to the Australian Family Therapy Conference in 2009 and takes Deleuze's paraphrase of the 17th century philosopher, Spinoza as a point of departure from common sense views of identity. Can resilience be possessed by some as a personal quality enhancing their coping skills or might resilience be a vital aspect of living which passes through us? Perhaps resilience bounces back towards us and enables the unsettling of dogmatic beliefs and a stable sense of identity Enquiry might then shift from the moral; What kind of person am I? How should I live? towards an ethical position of wonder; What else might there be? What might I be capable of?This article invites an ethical exploration of desire, its capture and of resistance and explores the politics of identity; illustrated with men's journeys of struggle with violence, sexuality and belonging and the discovery of ethics and generous forms of love in the face of adversity.     

Sources of Resilience Among Chicano/a Youth: Forging Identities in the Borderlands

This ethnographic study explores the relationship between ethnic identity, particularly identification with traditional Mexican values and beliefs, and contemporary Chicano/a adolescents' perceptions of life challenges. Findings suggest that identification with core values and beliefs rooted in traditional Mexican American culture may be a protective factor contributing to resilience among second generation Mexican American adolescents. The authors discuss implications for practice and research based on the respondents' narratives.     

The response of youth to racial discrimination: implications for resilience theory

This paper presents a qualitative participatory study of Canadian young people who identified themselves as visible minorities and who have experienced discrimination based on their skin colour or ethnicity. Eighteen participants aged 15–24 (12 girls and 6 boys), representing four ethnic minority groups, participated in focus groups and in-depth interviews and shared their responses to racial discrimination against them. Analysis of the data from the four discussion groups reveals that racism occurs in everyday situations and places, a lot of times manifesting itself as subtle forms of discrimination. Our findings also suggest that most of the participants tend to employ non-confrontational approaches when dealing with racial violence against them, and provide us with the rationale behind their intentions. Further, youth are not uniformly impacted by racialized events, and therefore the coping strategies they use vary based on individual and contextual factors. Three common strategies for healing can be derived from the participants’ narratives: expressive-emotional, spiritual-forgiving and communicative-relational. We discuss our findings in the light of theoretical frameworks of resilience and coping approaches and argue that young people’s subjective appraisals of racialized events as well as contextual factors need to be addressed in any discussion on coping and resilience within minority youth populations.     

Gender please, without the gender police: rethinking pain in archetypal narratives of butch, transgender, and FTM masculinity

Why is it that many of the often-cited narratives about butch, FTM, and/or transgender masculinity happen to be fictions that highlight suffering as a de facto rite of passage for the butch, FTM, or transgendered protagonist? This essay attempts to answer that question, first by outlining the "coherentist assumptions" of lesbian feminism and the forms of gender-policing that cast butch, FTM, and transgendered subjectivities as "false consciousness." It then analyzes the practice of anchoring butch, FTM, and/or transgender identity claims in pain-filled narratives such as "The Well of Loneliness," "Stone Butch Blues," and "Boys Don't Cry." While these narratives do important cultural work-exposing the violence heaped upon butches, FTMs, and transgendered guys-it may be time to imagine alternative narratives that are less invested in suffering as a barometer of masculine authenticity.     

Between a rock and a hard place: Multisystem resilience and Honduran youth migration intentions

More is known about how ‘push factors’ motivate emigration and how immigrants adapt to their new environment than about psychological factors associated with migration intentions for those experiencing adversity in their country of origin. This paper explores the association between multisystem resilience and migration intentions among youth in Honduras. In this context of high economic need and contextual violence, higher levels of resilience are associated with higher levels of migration intentions among those who have a job and thus the ability to navigate or negotiate access to resources – economic, social and psychological – that make it possible to consider migration. Among those who have not been victims of violence and consequently may not have that motivation to migrate, higher levels of resilience are associated with lower migration intentions.     

Gangster,victim or both? The interdiscursive construction of sameness and difference in self‐presentations

The paper conceptualizes two contradictory discourses, both used by ethnic minority drug dealers in a street drug market in Oslo, Norway. Oppression discourse includes personal narratives of unemployment, racism and psycho-social problems, often combined with stories about the government and city council being unwilling to help. Drug dealers use the discourse to justify drug dealing and violence, both for themselves and in meetings with welfare organizations. Gangster discourse , on the other hand, includes a series of personal narratives emphasizing how hard, smart, and sexually alluring the young men are. Drug dealers use this discourse to gain self-respect and respect from others, and it dominates interactions on the street. An important argument in this paper is that the discursive practice of criminals inspires theoretical perspectives on criminal practice. Oppression and gangster discourses have inspired, respectively, neutralization and subculture theory. When the same people use both discourses, however, the picture becomes more complicated. The 'bilingual' discursive practice of the street drug dealers reflects the ambivalent role of the researcher, and a Scandinavian institutional and social context where street drug dealers have extensive contact with a welfare state apparatus. The paper still suggests that similar interdiscursivity may have been sacrificed in previous research to produce more coherent theoretical frameworks.     

Narrative persuasion,identification, attitudes,and trustworthiness in crisis communication

The purpose of this study is to test the effects of narratives in crisis communication. This research assesses how organizations benefit from using stories in their media responses, relative to sharing nonnarrative information. The theory of crisis response narratives (Heath, 2004) holds that ethical narratives are effective because they enhance trustworthiness, attitudes toward the spokesperson, and identification with the spokesperson. Normative crisis communication theory exhorts disclosing truthful information rather than spinning. In an online experiment, participants (N = 365) watched a news interview in which a scandalized company’s spokesperson responded to a journalist’s questions with (a) ethical narratives, (b) unethical (spin) narratives, or (c) nonnarrative information. Multiple mediator modeling assessed identification with the spokesperson, attitudes toward the spokesperson, and perceived trustworthiness of the spokesperson. Results indicate ethical narratives are more effective than unethical narratives. However, nonnarrative information most effectively enhances trustworthiness and bolsters identification.     

Reflections on Hurricane Katrina by Older Adults

Abstract

This article presents three case studies of older adults who survived Hurricane Katrina. Their narratives are used to illustrate risk and resilience theory as well as principles of survivorship. Implications for social work practice are provided.     

Children’s Experiences of Completing a Computer‐Based Violence Survey: Ethical Implications

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about the ethics of research on children when studying sensitive issues such as violence. The empirical analysis is based on the accounts given by children (11 377) who completed a computer‐based questionnaire about their experiences of violence (‘The Finnish Child Victim Survey 2008’) and their reflections on the survey. We argue that experiences of violence should not be excluded from the research agenda on children due to ethical reasons, but that a more sophisticated practice should be developed instead to meet the needs and rights of children as informants. © 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation 2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.     

Desiring security/securing desire: (Re)re‐thinking alterity in security discourse

Abstract

This essay rearticulates historical and contemporary security discourse as a politics of desire bound to a masculinist and racialized notion of Selfhood. The Persian Gulf War and the Canada/Spain Turbot War are presented as case studies which typify how the securing of desire through warfare proceeds from an idea of the desirous rival a Other. The essay counters Guardian and Lananian narratives of a desire which emanates from a sense of lack, and leads to violence, with Levinas's understanding of desire as central to, rather than disruptive of, an ethical relation with alterity.     

Narratives of aging in intimate partner violence: The double lens of violence and old age

PurposeWith the increase in life expectancy, couples living in intimate partner violence are aging together. The aim of this article is to explore the constructions of aging in intimate partner violence as narratives of couplehood or narratives of old age.Design and methodsThirty individual in-depth interviews with 15 older Israeli couples were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a narrative approach.ResultsThree main domains emerged from the data: health issue narratives, loneliness narratives and relationships with adult offspring narratives. Each of the narratives that emerged from the data analysis consists of a narrative of old age constructing IPV and a narrative of IPV constructing old age.ImplicationsConflictual couplehood dynamics, such as intimate partner violence in old age, is not one-dimensional, but is diverse and complex and this should be taken into consideration.     

Mapping the body,voicing the margins: Using body maps to understand children’s embodied experiences of violence in Kingston,Jamaica

The study explores how children in an inner-city community of Jamaica deal with everyday violence. Using an art-based method called body mapping, we explored the ways children made sense of issues related to power, vulnerability, risk and resilience. The findings show how children's narratives and memories of their bodies merged with broader social and cultural structures governing their lives. Expressing their embodied experiences through the body mapping exercise, the children challenged and resisted normative sociocultural schemes of how they should be in the world by creating, re-envisioning and re-contextualising their bodies via a method that engaged with affective modes of knowledge.     

FEMALE CAREGIVERS’ REFLECTIONS ON ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING: THE INTERSECTION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ELDER CARE

As our population ages, increasing numbers of social workers and other therapists will provide counseling to women who are caregivers of frail elders. These female caregivers often face complex ethical dilemmas in caring for a frail elder. Furthermore, these dilemmas are compounded by domestic violence in the caregiver/frail elder relationship initiated before the onset of caregiving. Illustrated with case examples, this article presents an ethical decision-making model based on an empowerment framework for helping practitioners work with caregivers who face difficult dilemmas impacted by domestic violence. Implications for strengthening clinical practice with these caregivers are discussed.     

Strength‐Based Narrative Résumé Counseling: Constructing Positive Career Identities From Difficult Employment Histories

The résumé is a fixture within employment counseling, often viewed as a necessary product for securing employment. Résumés can also be a powerful vehicle for facilitating the development of positive career identities. The complex interplay of negative societal narratives with personal narratives can make the development of a positive identity, and the execution of an employment search, difficult for clients who have work histories complicated by personal and economic challenges (e.g., homelessness, intimate partner violence, histories of incarceration). The authors present résumé counseling as an opportunity for clients to develop stories of strength, reveal stories of difficulty, solidify a positive career identity, and rewrite positive future narratives. This article describes the strength‐based narrative approach to résumé and employment counseling, illustrates its application with a hypothetical case, and offers practice recommendations.     

Caring or Vulnerable Children? Sibling Relationships When Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Drawing on qualitative interviews with the children about how they and their siblings have responded to intimate partner violence, this paper explores processes of victim positioning. In their narratives, some children positioned themselves in line with notions of vulnerable victims, while others positioned themselves as caregivers or changed their positions vis‐à‐vis their siblings. In their stories, they assigned and assumed positions in interaction with their siblings. Receiving sibling support and care was in the narratives related to the quality of the sibling relationship, the shared experiences of violence and the age order.     

Complexity of domestic violence in a South Asian context in Hong Kong: cultural and structural impact

With the dearth of empirical research related to the experiences of domestic violence among South Asian communities in Hong Kong, this study engages with migrant South Asian women’s subjective understanding and experience of domestic violence. Presenting women’s narratives of their experiences with domestic violence allow for a better understanding of the complexities that inform and shape women’s experiences and decision-making in the face of partner violence. This empirical study investigated South Asian women’s experience of domestic violence in the context of Hong Kong through in-depth interviews with 14 South Asian women who had experienced abuse and 6 helping professionals from 4 social service agencies. Analysis of the data revealed that the nature and context of abuse posed as a barrier in their help seeking. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the influence of cultural and structural conditions and the difficulties and complexities women face that increases women’s vulnerability to abuse. This paper offers an analysis of how structures thereby come to impact on women’s distress and vulnerability. The study also highlights the need for inclusive service provision for minority ethnic women experiencing domestic violence.