Full Description
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.
Contents
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
