The Wounded Storyteller or Depression and Hope New Insights for Pastoral Counseling

The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

Author: Arthur W Frank

In At the Will of the Body, Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait.
Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine; they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering; when they turn their diseases into stories, they find healing.
Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic.
Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new.

Library Journal

At the conclusion of At the Will of the Body (LJ 3/15/91), Frank (sociology, Univ. of Calgary) wrote that "remission society is new." Members of this group are those who, like himself, all live with severe illness or disability and know firsthand "the value of the everyday." In his latest work, Frank expands his narrative from the particular to the universal, from the heart-wrenching story of illness to a sociological theory of illness and ethics. By analyzing the works of authors such as Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, Audre Lorde, and Oliver Sacks, as well as the narratives of countless chronically ill, Frank evolves a theory that sick, or "wounded," people tell their stories to make sense of their suffering and to find healing...thus becoming a "moral witness" in society. Frank's structured theorizing may become a landmark in academic sick-role research studies and medical studies. For academic medical collections.-James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York

Booknews

Frank (sociology, U. of Calgary) follows the story of his own battles with heart disease and cancer, as told in At the Will of the Body, with insights on people with life-threatening illnesses and the common themes in their personal narratives. For general readers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
1	When Bodies Need Voices	1
2	The Body's Problem with Illness	27
3	Illness as a Call for Stories	53
4	The Restitution Narrative	75
5	The Chaos Narrative	97
6	The Quest Narrative	115
7	Testimony	137
8	The Wound as Half Opening	169
	Notes	187
	Index	209

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Depression and Hope: New Insights for Pastoral Counseling

Author: Howard W Ston

Depression is second only to marital difficulties as the most common reason for individuals to seek pastoral counseling.

For centuries, spiritual writers have probed melancholia, as it has been traditionally termed, to articulate the problem of meaning and the trustworthiness of existence. Today, however, depression is increasingly treated with drug therapies. Depression and Hope is an authoritative guide to appropriate ways of thinking about and treating depression for pastoral counselors. In his characteristically no-nonsense fashion, Stone explains the latest understandings of depression and its patterns, as well as the pros and cons of various drug treatments (including Prozac). Throughout he keeps before the reader the larger life questions posed by depression and its treatments. He places depression in the larger context of family and society and shows how proper handling of depression by clergy can increase the likelihood not only of a person's strong recovery, but also of a strengthened faith.