Narrative therapy in psychosis recovery.

Introduction: Facing extreme life experiences can impoverish the ability to narrate experience and self. Descriptive psychiatry's model of psychoeducation focusing insight in psychosis may fail its purpose and threaten the already damaged patient's identity. Through the process of accepting illness, a value-bearing individual can end up being considered dysfunctional and worthless and experience guilt, shame, hopelessness, demoralization and helplessness. Elseway, denying illness would be considered proof of anosognosia. Both situations may lead to illness narratives introjection, agency loss, own beliefs and competency mistrust and stagnation. Objectives: The aim is to show narrative therapy as an advantageous complement or alternative to objective psychiatry psychoeducation in psychosis clinical practice. Reintegrate one's life narratives and retrieve recovery agency is one of the most powerful, adaptative and healing a person can accomplish. Methods: Narrative model encourages the patient to build and tell coherent and desirable stories in which recovery is promoted, from a personal point of view, and validates these. A non-pathologizing speech, normalization, externalization, empathy, respect and kindness are recomended. It is fostered to embrace different truths and alternative versions of self, promoting dialogue and cooperation between selves to dynamize identity narratives and allow choosing a preferred self in each situation. Exploiting personal resources is encouraged. Results: The person feels reauthorized in the direction of life and recovery, starts narrating personal life stories and recover the possibility of social interaction. Conclusions: Through recovery process, the person regain an integrated sense of identity, separated from illness and develop an author-narrator-protagonist role in his own life story and the recovery process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]