The turn to narrative as a form of therapy has become a common practice with individuals telling their stories in private and public forums in hopes of finding healing and recovery for a wide variety of mental health disorders. With the emergence of the internet and the proliferation of new media forms, narrative practices have evolved concurrently. An examination of the digitally mediated narratives I call e-stories, on mental health community websites can provide a window into how people use psychological concepts in narratives to do mental health work in everyday life (Edwards & Potter, 1992). This case study of the HealthyPlace online journal community shows how e-stories play a significant role in self-identity construction and ideological reproductive work in relation to mental illness and recovery. This research examines autobiographical introductions posted on twenty-eight journal homepages to explore how everyday people use psychotherapeutic coherence systems — lay versions of expert knowledge — to demonstrate expertise and authority while organizing experiences into a socially sharable narrative, characterizing self-identity in terms of illness and health simultaneously. These e-stories reveal the power of language to serve as a tool to negotiate community membership, reproduce ideologies about mental health and recovery, and employ narrative devices online to represent self-identities of people as “screwed up, but working on it.”
2021. The Suicidal Self in Cyberspace: Discursive Constructions of Identity in a Pro-Recovery Suicide Forum. Frontiers in Communication 6
Smith-Frigerio, Sarah
2021. “You are Not Alone”: Linking Peer Support to Information and Resources for Mental Health Concerns in Advocacy Groups’ Social Media Messaging. Health Communication 36:14 ► pp. 1980 ff.
Smith-Frigerio, Sarah
2023. #ImMentallyIllAndIDontKill: A Case Study of Grassroots Health Advocacy Messages on Twitter Following the Dayton and El Paso Shootings. In The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication, ► pp. 461 ff.
Defossez, Ellen
2018. Unending Narrative, One-sided Empathy, and Problematic Contexts of Interaction in David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”. Journal of Medical Humanities 39:1 ► pp. 15 ff.
Strong, T., K. Chondros & V. Vegter
2018. Medicalizing tensions in counselor education?. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 20:2 ► pp. 220 ff.
Harding, David J., Cheyney C. Dobson, Jessica J. B. Wyse & Jeffrey D. Morenoff
2017. Narrative change, narrative stability, and structural constraint: The case of prisoner reentry narratives. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5:1-2 ► pp. 261 ff.
Rothfelder, Katy & Davi Johnson Thornton
2017. Man Interrupted: Mental Illness Narrative as a Rhetoric of Proximity. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47:4 ► pp. 359 ff.
Parsloe, Sarah M. & Austin S. Babrow
2016. Removal of Asperger’s syndrome from the DSM V: community response to uncertainty. Health Communication 31:4 ► pp. 485 ff.
Hunt, Daniel & Kevin Harvey
2015. Health Communication and Corpus Linguistics: Using Corpus Tools to Analyse Eating Disorder Discourse Online. In Corpora and Discourse Studies, ► pp. 134 ff.
Strong, Tom
2015. Diagnoses, Relational Processes and Resourceful Dialogs: Tensions for Families and Family Therapy. Family Process 54:3 ► pp. 518 ff.
Strong, Tom
2017. Individualizing and Socializing the Mental Health Monoculture. In Medicalizing Counselling, ► pp. 99 ff.
Strong, Tom, Karen H. Ross & Monica Sesma-Vazquez
2015. Counselling the (self?) diagnosed client: generative and reflective conversations. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 43:5 ► pp. 598 ff.
Strong, Tom & Monica Sesma-Vazquez
2015. Discourses on Children’s Mental Health: A Critical Review. In The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health, ► pp. 99 ff.
Thylstrup, Birgitte, Morten Hesse, Marianne Thomsen & Liv Heerwagen
2015. Experiences and narratives – Drug users with antisocial personality disorder retelling the process of treatment and change. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy 22:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.