Chapter 6 - Narrative Identity, Illness, and Well-Being

Summary

In Chapter 6, we first review ideas about how illness disrupts ongoing narratives and how narrative reorganization is required to make sense of illness. We touch on the role of communicating suffering through narrative and how listening to narratives allows healthcare professionals to take the perspective of service users. We then discuss proposals that constructing adaptive narrative identity may be essential in psychotherapy. Following this, we review studies demonstrating that individuals with psychopathology construct their narrative identity with less agency, communion, and positive meaning and that these same features are related to lower well-being. We outline possible relations between trauma, narrative identity, and psychopathology. Finally, we describe relevant studies of first-person perspectives on mental illness and explain how previous research relates to our life story analyses.