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

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 Professor of Social Medicine and Epidemiology at the Medical School Brandenburg Theodor Fontane. 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 the influence of medical and statistical technologies on patient narratives, experiences, and decision making. 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.

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