ABSTRACT
This unique book explores stories from educational, community, social, health, therapeutic and therapy perspectives, acknowledging a range of diverse social and cultural views in which stories are used and written by esteemed storytellers, artists, therapists and academics from around the globe. Storytelling is a major activity of human communication;it is an age-old tradition, used in many ways by different societies at different moments. Storytelling and stories can be entertaining, therapeutic and educative. The book is like the old saying a 'stitch in time'-stories are a way of dealing with difficulties before they become real problems. The book perfectly fits the context of arts, arts in health and creative arts therapies in that, through the cross-section of chapters, it touches on every single function of storytelling. The book is fascinating in the way it harnesses our day-to-day realities as seen from the storytelling perspective. It is divided into five parts, each created around a particular theme, with chapters from renowned world-class scholars on aspects of stories and storytelling. The first part is dedicated to COVID-19 stories. Part II delves into stories and therapeutic texts. Part III paints a picture of how stories can be used in educational, community and social settings for general therapeutic purposes. This somehow connects with Part IV, which examines stories and therapeutic texts in a health and therapy context. The book provides a deeper understanding of the different contexts and settings in which stories are, can and should be used. Finally, it finishes with a moving story about memory loss. It is evident in this book that stories provide consolation and encouragement to continue search for answers to our human condition. The stories and therapeutic stories and ideas around them presented in this international handbook tell the underlying truth of human existence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
This chapter shares the author's personal experiences during the early part of the lockdown in the UK in the spring of 2020, with all the uncertainties it created, and considers it from a dramatic storied perspective. It presents the author's perspective of creating a story out of COVID-19. Over the coming weeks in the spring of 2020, as the virus spread in lightning dramatic form, was a series of intertwined stories neither the author nor anyone else had fully processed. They were being encouraged to work from home. As we moved into March the government suggested that we should not have mass meetings, not go to pubs, sporting events or concerts. The notion of working from home and social distancing were being considered. We were all inadvertently being drawn into a classic dramatic story of life and death, without having the distance or space to respond fully to the emotions created. From a dramatherapy perspective, one could argue this is Jung's 'Collective Unconscious' at its most literal and dramatic-an unseen virus spreading throughout the very DNA of all humankind, that was completely unknown to us till a few months earlier, had no antidote and could be deadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)