Illness Narratives in Practice: Potentials and Challenges of Using Narratives in Health-related Contexts

by Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele; Holmberg, Christine; Meyer, Thorsten

• ISBN13: 9780198806660
• ISBN10: 0198806663
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-12-19
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Gabriele Lucius-Hoene, Professor, Department of Rehabilitation psychology and psychotherapy, University of Freiburg, Germany,Christine Holmberg, Doctor, Institute of Public Health/ Charite Universitatsmedizin, Berlin, Germany,Thorsten Meyer, Professor, Integrative Rehabilitation Research Unit and Institute of Epidemiology, Hannover Medical School, Germany

Gabriele Lucius-Hoene is a retired professor and psychotherapeut at the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology, Institute of Pschology, University of Freiburg. Her research interests are narrative and conversational analysis of life stories, especially illness narratives, and the ways people construct their identities and cope with challenges and suffering by telling their stories.

Christine Holmberg is senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Public Health at Charite - Universitatsmedizin Berlin, where she focuses on health services research, science studies, and qualitative methods. She was trained in anthropology at Humboldt University Berlin and Harvard Medical School and in epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include patient narratives, experiences and decision making. She is co-editor of the recently published The politics of vaccination: a global history (Manchester University Press)


Thorsten Meyer is Professor of Rehabilitation Sciences and has recently become a member of the Faculty of Public Health at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Trained as a psychologist, he has worked in different health research departments (social psychiatry, social medicine, rehabilitation) in Germany and Switzerland. He currently serves as a speaker of the Qualitative Research Working Group with the German Network on Health Services Research.

Table of Contents

Section 1: Introduction
1. Introduction: Chances and problems of illness narratives, Gabriele Lucius-Hoene, Christine Holmberg and Thorsten Meyer
Section 2: Methodological and epistemological challenges
2. Illness narratives in practice: which questions do we have to face when collecting and using them?, Gabriele Lucius-Hoene, Martina Breuning and Cornelia Helfferich
3. The researchers' role in re-constructing patient narratives to present them as patient experiences, Janka Koschack and Wolfgang Himmel
4. Stories, illness and narrative norms, Lars-Christer Hyden
5. Choices of illness narratives in practice: applying ideas of sampling and generalizability, Thorsten Meyer and Margret Xylander
Section 3: Ethical and communicational aspects of using narratives in medicine
6. Illness Narratives in Counselling - Narrative Medicine and Narrative Ethics, Hille Haker
7. An Illness Narrative or a Social Injustice Narrative?, Maya Lavie-Ajayi and Ora Nakash
Section 4: Narratives in psychotherapy, rehabilitation and vocational training
8. Retelling one's life story - Using narratives to improve quality of life in case of chronic language impairment, Sabine Corsten and Friedericke Hardering
9. Narrative practice, Neurotrauma, and Rehabilitation, Peter Frommelt, Maria I. Medved, and Jens Brockmeier
10. Illness narratives in the workplace, Ernst von Kardoff
Section 5: Narratives in training of communication and empathy
11. Using narratives for Medical Humanities in medical training, Alexander Kiss and Claudia Steiner
12. Narratives for training doctors in Korea, Yon Ok Jung, Gabriele Lucius-Hoene and Yong Ik Bak
13. How to use illness narratives in medical education: First teaching experiences with the German DIPEx website project, Alexander Palant and Wolfgang Himmel
14. Using patient narratives as source material for creative writing, Paula McDonald
15. Engaging the Vulnerable Encounter: engendering narratives for change in healthcare practice by using participatory theatre methods, Chris Heape, Henry Larsen, and Merja Ryoppy
16. Drawing on narrative accounts of dementia in education and care, Joyce Lamerichs and Manna Alma
Section 6: Narratives in diagnostics
17. Using illness narratives in clinical diagnosis: narrative reconstruction of epileptic and non-epileptic seizures and panic attacks, Elisabeth Gulich
18. Structural Dream Analysis: a narrative methodology for investigating the meaning of dream series and their development in the course of psychotherapy, Christian Rosler
Section 7: Narratives in decision making
19. What's in a name: anecdotes, experience, and the meaning of stories, Christine Holmberg
20. Narratives in decision aids: A controversy, Victoria A. Shaffer and Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher
Section 8: Narratives in health care
21. Understanding and using health experiences to improve healthcare - examples from the United Kingdom, Lisa Hinton, Louise Locock and Sue Ziebland
22. Illness narratives as evidence for healthcare policy, Susan Law, Ilja Ormel, David Loutfi and John Lavis
23. When Public and Private Narratives Diverge: Media, Policy Advocacy, and the Paradoxes of Newborn Screening Policy, Rachel Grob and Mark Schlesinger
Section 9: Illness narratives in the media
24. Pregnancy 2.0: A Corpus-based Case Study for the Analysis of Illness Narratives Online, Eleonora Massa and Valentina Simeoni
25. Changes in Authenticity: Perceptions of Parents and Youth with ADHD of the Effects of Stimulant Medication, Erez C. Miller and Amos Fleischman
26. Illness narratives in political communication: instrumental, institutional, and social functions of political actors' public illness accounts, Matthias Bandtel