Psychiatry that recognizes the essential role of community in creating a new story of mental health

• Provides a critique of conventional psychiatry and a look at what mental health care could be

• Includes stories used in the author's healing practice that draw from traditional cultures around the world

Conventional psychiatry is not working. The pharmaceutical industry promises it has cures for everything that ails us, yet a recent study on antidepressants showed there is no difference of success in prescribed pharmaceuticals from placebos when all FDA-reported trials are considered instead of just the trials published in journals. Up to 80 percent of patients with bipolar depression remain symptomatic despite conventional treatment, and 10 to 20 percent of these patients commit suicide.

In Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to ?fix? them. What needs ?fixing? is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. He shows how this innovative approach is actually more compatible with what we are learning about the biology of the brain and genetics than the conventional model of psychiatry. Drawing on wisdom both ancient and new, he demonstrates the power and success of narrative psychiatry to bring forth change and lasting transformation.

Autorentext

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician, associate professor at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine, and executive director of the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation. The author of several books, including Narrative Medicine and Coyote Medicine, he lives in Orono, Maine.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: There's Nothing But Story

Part I
History and Foundations

1 Conventional Mental Health Today
2 Good Stories and Mental Health
3 How Do We Learn to Be Who We Are?
4 How Do We Learn to Feel What We Feel?
5 The Meaning of Pain and Depression
6 Story and the Shaping of Identity

Part II
Science and Mind

7 How Culture Changes Biology and Genetics
8 How Culture Is Context and Context Shapes Behavior
9 Stories from Science: Change Is Always Possible

Part III
The Practice of Narrative Psychiatry

10 The Power of Ceremony
11 How Communities Create Change
12 To Story or Not to Story
13 Indigenous Models for the Practice of Psychiatry and Mental Health

Part IV
Examples of Narrative Psychiatry in Action

14 Narratives for Anxiety and Depression
15 Narratives and Bipolar Disorder
16 Narrative Approaches to Psychosis

Notes

About the Author

Index