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Narratives, Health, and Healing Communication Theory, Research, and Practice LEA’S COMMUNICATION SERIES Jennings Bryant/Dolf Zillmann, General Editors Selected titles in Applied Communication (Teresa L. Thompson, Advisory Editor) include: Braithwaite/Thompson • Handbook of Communication and People With Disabilities: Research and Application Greene/Derlega/Yep/Petronio • Privacy and Disclosure of HIV in Interpersonal Relationships: A Sourcebook for Researchers and Practitioners Hummert/Nussbaum • Aging, Communication, and Health: Linking Research and Practice for Successful Aging Nussbaum/Coupland • Handbook of Communication and Aging Research, Second Edition Segrin/Flora • Family Communication Socha/Diggs • Communication, Race, and Family: Exploring Communication in Black, White, and Biracial Families Thompson/Dorsey/Miller/Parrott • Handbook of Health Communication Vangelisti • Handbook of Family Communication Williams/Nussbaum • Intergenerational Communication Across The Life Span Narratives, Health, and Healing Communication Theory, Research, and Practice Edited by Lynn M. Harter Ohio University Phyllis M. Japp University of Nebraska-Lincoln Christina S. Beck Ohio University LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS 2005 Mahwah, New Jersey London This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 www.erlbaum.com Cover design by Sean Sciarrone Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narratives, health, and healing : communication theory, re- search, and practice / edited by Lynn M. Harter, Phyllis M. Japp, Christina S. Beck. p. cm. — (LEA’s communication series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-5031-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8058-5032-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social medicine. 2. Physician and patient. 3. Discourse Analysis, Narrative. 4. Narration (Rhetoric). I. Harter, Lynn M. II. Japp, Phyllis M. III. Beck, Christina S. IV. Series. RA418.N365 2005 362.1’042—dc22 2004057531 CIP ISBN 1-4106-1345-3 Master e-book ISBN In Dedication … I dedicate this book to my parents Rich and Bev Harter. Dad, I have learned how to live by watching you re-story your life in light of multiple myeloma. Bev, I have learned how to give by watching you care for others during sickness and health. —Lynn I dedicate this book to my grandchildren, Brendan and Rachel Japp. You’ve enriched my life beyond measure. —Phyllis I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandfather, George Groscost, who went home to be with the Lord as we finished this book. Thanks for always being so proud of me! —Christie Contents Foreword xi Arthur W. Frank Preface and Acknowledgments xv Part I: Overview of Narrative and Health Communication Theorizing Introduction by Phyllis M. Japp, Lynn M. Harter, and Christina S. Beck 1 Vital Problematics of Narrative Theorizing About Health 7 and Healing Lynn M. Harter, Phyllis M. Japp, and Christina S. Beck 2 Narrating Problems and Problematizing Narratives: Linking 31 Problematic Integration and Narrative Theory in Telling Stories About Our Health Austin S. Babrow, Kimberly N. Kline, and William K. Rawlins Part II: Personal Narratives and Public Dialogues Introduction by Phyllis M. Japp 3 Becoming the Story: Narratives as Collaborative, Social 61 Enactments of Individual, Relational, and Public Identities Christina S. Beck vii viii CONTENTS 4 Time, Technology, and Meritocracy: The Disciplining 83 of Women’s Bodies in Narrative Constructions of Age-Related Infertility Lynn M. Harter, Erika L. Kirby, Autumn Edwards, and Andrea McClanahan 5 Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Narratives 107 of a Biomedically Invisible Disease Phyllis M. Japp and Debra K. Japp 6 Death as the Representative Anecdote in the Construction 131 of the Collegiate “Binge-Drinking” Problem Thomas Workman 7 State-Induced Illness and Forbidden Stories: The Role 149 of Storytelling in Healing Individual and Social Traumas in Romania Teodora Carabas and Lynn M. Harter 8 Cross-Border Mass-Mediated Health Narratives: Narrative 169 Transparency, “Safe Sex,” and Indian Viewers Arvind Singhal, Ketan Chitnis, and Ami Sengupta Part III: Narrating and Organizing Health Care Events and Resources Introduction by Lynn M. Harter 9 Our Family’s Physician 197 William K. Rawlins 10 Narrative Knowledge Development Among Caregivers: 217 Stories From the Nurses’ Station Jayne Morgan-Witte 11 Rx Story Prescriptions: Healing Effects of Storytelling 237 and Storylistening in the Practice of Medicine Sunwolf, Lawrence R. Frey, and Lisa Keränen CONTENTS ix 12 Narrative Medicine and Education in Palliative Care 259 Sandra L. Ragan, Tiffany Mindt, and Elaine Wittenberg-Lyles 13 Contesting Narratives of Workplace Maternity 277 Patrice M. Buzzanell and Laura L. Ellingson 14 Wholeness in a Breaking World: Narratives as Sustenance 295 for Peace Magdalyn Z. Miller, Patricia Geist Martin, and Kristen Cannon Beatty Part IV: Narrative Sense-Making About Self and Other Introduction by Christina S. Beck 15 How I Fired My Surgeon and Embraced an Alternate 325 Narrative Barbara F. Sharf 16 “My Mom Had a Stroke”: Understanding How Patients 343 Raise and Providers Respond to Psychosocial Concerns Wayne A. Beach and Jenny Mandelbaum 17 Constructing Life and Death Through Final Conversation 365 Narratives Maureen P.Keeley and Jody Koenig Kellas 18 An Examination of the Role of Narratives and Storytelling 391 in Bereavement Cecilia Bosticco and Teresa L. Thompson 19 Agency Through Narrative: Patients Managing Cancer Care 413 in a Challenging Environment Dan O’Hair, Denise Scannell, and Sharlene Thompson Afterword: Continuing the Conversation: Reflections 433 on Our Emergent Scholarly Narratives Christina S. Beck, Lynn M. Harter, and Phyllis M. Japp x CONTENTS Contributor Biographical Statements 445 References 457 Author Index 503 Subject Index 513 Foreword— Stories By and About Us Arthur W. Frank University of Calgary Books like this one become increasingly necessary, because the weave of stories about health and illness has become dense. Two trends have intensified in the last 10 years, both affecting what stories people tell. One is the increasing separation of health from illness, bringing about a new species of health stories. People have always talked about their ailments. A good case can be made that now people are talking in new ways about their health, and we are only beginning to question how these health stories affect illness stories. Illness stories have also pro- liferated during the last decade, told from an increasing variety of per- spectives, as more groups have some stake in what illness is and how it is regarded. All of these stories—health and illness stories together— constitute a formless but formative framework of interpretive effects that structures people’s sense of what events and actions are worth telling stories about and how these stories are to be understood, in- cluding what actions follow from them. Health, increasingly distinct from illness, comprises its own prac- tices, professional practitioners, discourses, and institutional delivery sites. Practices include but are hardly limited to fitness, diet, diverse uses of complementary medicine, and a variety of medical enhance- ment technologies (Ellott, 2003; Parens, 1998; Rothman & Rothman, xi xii FOREWORD 2004), including pharmacology (Prozac, Viagra, Ritalin), surgery (ever-expanding uses of cosmetic surgery and adjunctive techniques), and a veritable promised land of possibilities for health and com- merce, with genetics receiving the greatest hype. Enhancement medi- cine pushes people to think of the body as a collection of parts, to be upgraded as one desires and can afford (Frank, 2002c). Products from skin cream to foods to clothing (e.g., fabrics with sun protection) are sold under a rubric of health. Complementary medical services claim to improve the body’s structural alignment, enhance the immune sys- tem, detoxify, tone, stimulate, and rejuvenate. These practices are vari- ously offered, taught, or sold by professionals from the highly credentialed (physicians) to the marginally certified (store “consul- tants”). Like all practices, products, and professionals, each implies a story about what a body can and ought to be, and how a life can and ought to be lived to make that desired body possible. People tell stories about how they have used or refused these services, and what sorts of lives have followed from these decisions. Illness stories are told within a dense weave of stories people tell about their own bodies and stories from elsewhere, told (usually from a stance of expertise) about the ill bodies of other people, including both patients (the currently ill) and bodies at risk (the virtually ill). This weave is denser—there are simply more stories, from more sources, about more bodies—than it was in 1991, when my story of my several years of serious illness, At the Will of the Body (Frank, 2002a), was published. I was attempting to write a story that could be a sort of companion to other ill people, allowing them to compare experiences and observations. The story was my own,

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