Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences.
The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father-daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L’Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a “schizophrenic” identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students.
Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory.
Read the chapter “Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Angela D. Henderson is a faculty member in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia.

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Carla Paterson teaches in the interdisciplinary Arts Foundations program at the University of British Columbia.

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Connie Canam is a faculty member in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia.

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Valerie Raoul is a professor of women’s studies and French and the director of the SAGA Centre for Studies in Autobiography, Gender, and Age; Connie Canam and Angela D. Henderson are faculty members in the School of Nursing; Carla Paterson teaches in the interdisciplinary Arts Foundations program, all at the University of British Columbia. Funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the editors were involved in the interdisciplinary project on narratives of disease, disability, and trauma on which this book is based.

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