Care as narrative practice in the context of long-term care: Theoretical considerations.

Aims And Objectives: In this article, we introduce care itself as a narrative practice. We emphasise that all interactions between care providers and older adults in long-term care settings are narrative in nature and foreground experience.

Background: Every person consists of innumerable stories based on experiences over time.

Micro-citizenship, dementia and long-term care.

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the concept of citizenship as a lens through which to understand dementia practice. This move from an individualist, personhood-based approach towards an understanding of people with dementia as a group facing social and structural discrimination parallels, in some ways, that previously seen in the realms of disability and mental health which have sought to politicize those experiences. In so doing, the debate has sought to reconfigure power relations, insisting that members of such discriminated groups are people with power entitled to the same from life as everyone else.

Narrative ethics for narrative care.

Narrative permeates health care--from patients' stories taken as medical histories to the development of health policy. The narrative approach to health care has involved the move from narratives in health care as objects of study to the lens through which health care is studied and, more recently, to narrative as a form of care. In this paper, I argue that narrative care requires a move in the field of ethics--from a position where narratives are used to inform ethical decision making to one in which narrative is the form and process of ethical decision making.

Narrative and resilience: A comparative analysis of how older adults story their lives.

Of increasing interest to gerontologists is resilience: the capacity for coping with the challenges of later life with openness and positivity. An overlooked factor in resilience, however, is the narrative complexity of older persons' self-accounts. The research on which this article is based is part of a larger project aimed at assessing the role of narrative interventions in strengthening the stories that older people tell about their lives.

Narrative, ethics and people with severe mental illness.

Starting from the premise that people are essentially narrative beings, I argue that the onset of severe mental illness compromises the narrative enterprise of being able to construct one's Self and one's relationships in meaningful and coherent ways. This is due to both the curtailment of opportunities for narrative engagement and the dispossession of those whose narratives do not conform to the current conceptualization of narrative and narrativity. In these circumstances, supporting the narrative enterprise is an ethical endeavour that requires that we examine not only which narratives we construct, but also how we construct them.

Ethics and dementia: mapping the literature by bibliometric analysis.

Objectives: This paper reports on a bibliometric analysis of keywords in the literature on ethics and dementia during the period 1980-2000.

Methods: Keywords were drawn from titles, abstracts and keyword fields of 14 bibliographic databases and clustered in to 19 categories. These categories were then examined for their frequency and co-occurrences.