David Epston – författare

Narrative Psychiatry and Family Collaborations is about helping families with complex psychiatric problems by seeing and meeting the families and the family members, as the best versions of themselves, before we see and address the diagnoses.This book draws on ten years of clinical research and contains stories about helping people, who are heavily burdened with psychiatric illnesses, to find ways to live a life as close as possible to their dreams. The chapters are organized according to ideas, values, and techniques. The book describes family-oriented practices, narrative collaborative practices, narrative psychiatric practices, and narrative agency practices. It also talks about wonderfulness interviewing, mattering practices, public note taking on paper charts, therapeutic letter writing, diagnoses as externalized problems, narrative medicine, and family community meetings. Each chapter includes case studies that illustrate the theory, ethics, and practice, told by Nina Jørring in collaboration with the families and colleagues.The book will be of interest to child and adolescent psychiatrists and all other mental health professionals working with children and families.

Narrative Psychiatry and Family Collaborations is about helping families with complex psychiatric problems by seeing and meeting the families and the family members, as the best versions of themselves, before we see and address the diagnoses.This book draws on ten years of clinical research and contains stories about helping people, who are heavily burdened with psychiatric illnesses, to find ways to live a life as close as possible to their dreams. The chapters are organized according to ideas, values, and techniques. The book describes family-oriented practices, narrative collaborative practices, narrative psychiatric practices, and narrative agency practices. It also talks about wonderfulness interviewing, mattering practices, public note taking on paper charts, therapeutic letter writing, diagnoses as externalized problems, narrative medicine, and family community meetings. Each chapter includes case studies that illustrate the theory, ethics, and practice, told by Nina Jørring in collaboration with the families and colleagues.The book will be of interest to child and adolescent psychiatrists and all other mental health professionals working with children and families.

This book describes a basic theory of collaborative narrative play, as well as verbal and nonverbal techniques that clear the way for stories of hope, possibility, and change. Compelling case examples, drawn from the authors' work, will appeal to parents and educators as well as therapists.

The authors' decade-and-a-half collaboration with 'insiders' has yielded fresh answers to these life and death questions: How does a/b seduce and terrorize girls and women? Why is a/b successful in encouraging girls and women to unwittingly embrace their would-be murderer? How can such a murderer be exposed and thwarted? This book details a unique way of thinking and speaking about anorexia/bulimia. By having conversations with insiders in which the problem is viewed as an external influence rather than a part of the person, these therapists show how to bring the tactics of a/b into the open, expose its deceptions, break its spell, and encourage defiance of its tyrannical rule. These innovations enable insiders, professionals, and loved ones to unite against anorexia/bulimia rather than allowing a/b to pit a professional or loved one against an insider, and the insider against herself. Coercion is sidestepped in favor of practices that are collaborative, accountable and spirit-nurturing. The groundbreaking discoveries outlined in this book will provide new options, inspiration and hope, not only for those who suffer at anorexia's hands, but also for their loved ones and healthcare professionals.

How to apply the definitive postmodern therapeutic technique in a variety of situations, including treating alcoholics, counseling students, treating male sexual abuse survivors, and more. Written with scholarship, energy, practicality, and awareness.

Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Ngā Kūaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Māori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Māori sources.The authors provide historical examples of Western mystical experiences and contrasting Western psychiatric and psychological explanations of voices and visions as hallucinations. Further chapters focus on narratives and perspectives from people who have experienced voices and visions, and have had interactions with mental health services, told from multiple viewpoints; individual, whānau (family), Māori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Māori healing and psychiatry approaches on wellbeing are examined. Drawing on their 18-year partnership, Wiremu and Allister highlight the harmful colonial impact of psychiatry in suppressing Māori views of voices and visions. They describe ways of working together in clinical practice to address this history of injustice and how to identify whether distressing perceptual experiences may represent Māori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms or all of these. This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Māori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Māori and perhaps other peoples.

Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Ngā Kūaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Māori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Māori sources.The authors provide historical examples of Western mystical experiences and contrasting Western psychiatric and psychological explanations of voices and visions as hallucinations. Further chapters focus on narratives and perspectives from people who have experienced voices and visions, and have had interactions with mental health services, told from multiple viewpoints; individual, whānau (family), Māori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Māori healing and psychiatry approaches on wellbeing are examined. Drawing on their 18-year partnership, Wiremu and Allister highlight the harmful colonial impact of psychiatry in suppressing Māori views of voices and visions. They describe ways of working together in clinical practice to address this history of injustice and how to identify whether distressing perceptual experiences may represent Māori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms or all of these. This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Māori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Māori and perhaps other peoples.

Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography takes a new pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in contemporary narrative therapy, based in autoethnography and storytelling. The individual client stories aim to paint each therapeutic meeting in such detail that the reader will come to feel as though they actually know the two or more people in the room. This approach moves beyond the standard narrative practice of teaching by transcripts and steps into teaching narrative therapy through autoethnography. The intention of these 'teaching tales' is to offer the reader an opportunity to enter into the very 'heart and soul' of narrative therapy practice, much like reading a novel has you enter into the lives of the characters that inhabit it. This work has been used by the authors in MA and PhD level classrooms, workshops, week-long intensive courses, and conferences around the world, where it has received commendations from both newcomer and veteran narrative therapists.The aim of this book is to introduce narrative therapy and the value of integrating autoethnographic methods to students and new clinicians. It can also serve as a useful tool for advanced teachers of narrative practices. In addition, it will appeal to established clinicians who are curious about narrative therapy (who may be looking to add it to their practice), as well as students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry and methods.

Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography takes a new pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in contemporary narrative therapy, based in autoethnography and storytelling. The individual client stories aim to paint each therapeutic meeting in such detail that the reader will come to feel as though they actually know the two or more people in the room. This approach moves beyond the standard narrative practice of teaching by transcripts and steps into teaching narrative therapy through autoethnography. The intention of these 'teaching tales' is to offer the reader an opportunity to enter into the very 'heart and soul' of narrative therapy practice, much like reading a novel has you enter into the lives of the characters that inhabit it. This work has been used by the authors in MA and PhD level classrooms, workshops, week-long intensive courses, and conferences around the world, where it has received commendations from both newcomer and veteran narrative therapists.The aim of this book is to introduce narrative therapy and the value of integrating autoethnographic methods to students and new clinicians. It can also serve as a useful tool for advanced teachers of narrative practices. In addition, it will appeal to established clinicians who are curious about narrative therapy (who may be looking to add it to their practice), as well as students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry and methods.

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Māori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family’s experience of Māori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Māori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Māori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family’s experience of Māori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Māori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.

White and Epston base their therapy on the assumption that people experience problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not sufficiently represent their lived experience. Therapy then becomes a process of storying or restorying the lives and experiences of these people. In this way narrative comes to play a central role in therapy. Both authors share delightful examples of a storied therapy that privileges a person’s lived experience, inviting a reflexive posture and encouraging a sense of authorship and reauthorship of one’s experiences and relationships in the telling and retelling of one’s story.

Therapists may marvel at children’s imaginative triumphs, but how often do they recognize such talents as vital to the therapy hour? Should therapists reserve a space for make-believe only when nothing is at stake, or might it be precisely those moments when something truly matters that imagination is most urgently needed?  This book offers an alternative to therapeutic perspectives that treat children as vulnerable and helpless. It invites readers to consider how the imaginative gifts and knowledge of children, when supported by the therapist and family, can bring about dramatic change.  The book begins with an account of the foundations of narrative theory. It explains how such elements as language, characterization, and suspense contribute to the coherence of a story and bring young people into focus.  Each subsequent chapter provides specific suggestions for the practice of narrative therapy. Examples of the difficulties children face are offered, along with narrative interventions and tips for overcoming common barriers that can arise along the way. Readers will learn a variety of ready-to-implement strategies, including how to personify problems, compose letters to affirm children’s identities, summon fairies to lend a helping hand, and many more. Sample dialogues between the authors, children, and their parents bring the application of each practice to life, illuminating how even the most stubborn problem can be outwitted, sometimes by mischievous means.  With robust professional insight, Narrative Therapy in Wonderland will aid any practitioner in calling on children’s imaginative know-how. How often can a young person be spotted diving headlong into a world of fantasy? This book explores the extraordinary fact that these young people may, upon arrival in Wonderland, be far better equipped to take on even dire challenges than when they remain “up above.”