The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions

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.