PubMed Health⌕ Search

PubMed · 12735076

Client narratives: a theoretical perspective.

Abstract

The role of subjective client narratives in health care represents a clinical and therapeutic tool, useful in complementing objective, scientific data. Of particular interest to mental health practitioners is the role narratives play as a therapeutic tool to guide clinical practice. This paper lays a foundation for understanding the importance of narrative in the psychotherapeutic process. It provides a brief overview of narrative theory and methods of structural analysis in order to provide a theoretical approach that can be utilized by nurses to address clients' needs.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Deborah Dysart Gale, Ann M Mitchell, Linda Garand, Susan Wesner. Client narratives: a theoretical perspective.. https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840305306

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

It is hard work behaving as a credible patient: encounters between women with chronic pain and their doctors.

In various studies during the last decade, women with medically unexplained disorders have reported negative experiences during medical encounters. Accounts of being met with scepticism and lack of comprehension, feeling rejected, ignored, and being belittled, blamed for their condition and assigned psychological explanation models are common. Women patients exerted themselves to attract the doctor's medical attention and interest, and were anxious to be considered as whiners or complainers. Here, we explore the nature of "work" done by the patients in order to be believed, understood, and taken seriously when consulting the doctor. A qualitative study was conducted with in-depth interviews including a purposeful sampling of 10 women of varying ages and backgrounds with chronic muscular pain. The main outcome measures were descriptions reflecting the patients' activities or efforts invested in being perceived as a credible patient. We focused on the gendered dimensions of the experiences. The women patients' accounts indicated hard work to make the symptoms socially visible, real, and physical when consulting a doctor. Their efforts reflect a subtle balance not to appear too strong or too weak, too healthy or too sick, or too smart or too disarranged. Attempting to fit in with normative, biomedical expectations of correctness, they tested strategies such as appropriate assertiveness, surrendering, and appearance. The most important activities or efforts varied. However, the informants were not only struggling for their credibility. Their stories illustrated a struggle for the maintenance of self-esteem or dignity as patients and as women. The material was interpreted within a feminist frame of reference, emphasising the relationship between dignity and shame, power and disempowerment for women patients' with medically unexplained disorders.

Assertiveness↗