The work of the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, Palestine, seeks to link the biological/biomedical sphere to the political sphere through the concept of suffering. This interview explores the ways they work to expose the sociopolitical conditions of life in order to simultaneously personalise war and politicise health.

This article explores and researches the experience we could call ‘losing the Will to live’. It is based on narrative conversations the author conducted with a group of 10 clients during the years of 2008-2018 as a practicing narrative counsellor in Jerusalem. These conversations were to give space for the stories of these women to be heard and to discover their personal, expert knowledge on this topic, especially in contrast to cultural attitudes that often influence the way people relate to it. The author’s role was sensitively co-researching both the experience itself and the approaches people use to deal with it and find support ‒ inside and outside of formal therapy. Many of the original perspectives, insights and skills these women shared are presented in this article. The intention of the quotes and poems you will read here is to place their language and their experience at the centre of the research.

In this paper, we describe a project to support children from Burundi, Africa, who were orphaned by the civil war (1993 to 2003), or by poverty and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We present our experiences of offering training in collective narrative practices to caregivers and volunteers and providing therapy for the children, and we share our plans for the future. Our hope is to inspire others to do similar work in developing countries and to inform them of some of the possible pitfalls. Although we outline many of the heartbreaking realities of life for these children, our hope is that this paper also highlights how narrative practices can be used to help such children find moments of hope in their lives.

This paper reflects on two discourses – resilience and trauma – and how being more aware of these discourses and their effects helps me shape my work with children in group settings and individual conversations.

This paper describes the application of the dialectical narrative inquiry, a therapeutic approach that incorporates phenomenology and narrative inquiry within narrative practices in order to elicit double-storied accounts of people’s lives. I describe this approach through my work with Sarah, a 28-year-old university student who had been experiencing difficulties in her interpersonal relationships. Sarah and I were able to develop her personal dialectic, chart her landscapes through re-authoring questions, and clarify her positions regarding her problematic and preferred responses to experiences of ‘Ambivalence and Insensitivity’. Through the use of macro-scaffolding over subsequent sessions, Sarah and I were able to identify her personal values and her hopes and intentions for the future. We also identified specific barriers to enacting these preferences, and personal skills and knowledges that she would be able to draw on in order to move towards her hopes and intentions for the future.

This paper introduces the ‘narrative docket’, an innovation developed for work with adolescents who have been referred to social services by police or the legal system. The paper details the three components of the narrative docket, and demonstrates their application with a young person, Aiai1, in a time-limited case management program. The ideas underpinning the narrative docket include collective narrative practice, externalising problems, outsider witnessing, re-authoring and counter documentation.

This paper describes the development of a decolonising therapeutic practice for working with young people and their families in Aboriginal communities. It shows how different maps of narrative practice have been used to support Aboriginal young people and their families to develop storybooks as therapeutic documents that centre and honour their knowledges and worldviews.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing journalist, Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections (2018) and Chasing the Scream (2015a), and presenter of the Ted Talk ‘Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong’ (2015b). This was incredibly exciting for me, because many of his ideas are in alignment with the ideas and practices

of the Deconstructing Addiction League (2004), which I am currently developing. In his work, Johann offers fascinating insights into the study of ‘addiction’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’, and I’d like to share some of his findings with you.