Mental illness and personal recovery: A narrative identity framework.

This article presents a metamorphic model to describe the manifold role of narrative identity, a person's internal life story, across the course of mental illness and personal recovery. First, early adversity and negative co-authoring may contribute to the development of a fragile life story, which itself may combine with life stressors to increase the likelihood of mental illness. Second, mental illness may negatively impact the development of narrative identity, which in turn may exacerbate the devastating effects of mental illness on daily functioning.

Narrative identity in context: How adults in Japan, Denmark, Israel, and the United States narrate difficult life events.

Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, is a person's internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). While narrative identity has been found to be associated with a range of psychological and social phenomena (e.g.

Illness and narrative identity: examining past and future life story chapters in individuals with bipolar disorder, diabetes mellitus or no chronic illness.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether narrative identity challenges are specific to Bipolar Disorder (BD) as a mental illness or a reflection of living with chronic illness. Nineteen individuals diagnosed with BD, 29 individuals diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) and 25 controls without chronic mental or somatic illness identified past and future life story chapters which were self-rated on emotional tone and self-event connections and content-coded for agency and communion themes. Individuals with BD self-rated their past chapters as more negative and less positive, and their chapters were lower on content-coded agency and communion themes compared to T1DM and controls.

Asymmetric growth-limiting development of the female conceptus.

Introduction: Sex differences in prenatal growth may contribute to sex-dependent programming effects on postnatal phenotype.

Methods: We integrated for the first time phenotypic, histomorphological, clinico-chemical, endocrine and gene expression analyses in a single species, the bovine conceptus at mid-gestation.

Results: We demonstrate that by mid-gestation, before the onset of accelerated growth, the female conceptus displays asymmetric lower growth compared to males.