Acceptance and Change as Dialectic of Recovery: Examples of Storytelling, Fairy Tale and Psychopharmacotherapy as Therapeutic Modalities.

"Narative medicine" promotes theraputic healing and recovery using fairy tales and traditional folk stories. Individuals are capable of shaping their lives through various narrative strategies and re-authoring alternative stories that are concerned with different aspects of acceptance and change. Psychotherapy through the eyes of stories and fairy tales can have two perspectives. Firstly, fairy tale acts like a weft around which the very story/script of the patient is formed, which in itself becomes the basis for interpreting the occurrence of a mental disorder. The second perspective is the perspective of healing or getting out of a "fairytale" story/script by changing an incoherent life narrative into an alternative coherent narrative (reframing). The aim of this pilot case studies approach was to use a narrative approach based on stories and fairy tales in order to promote psychological growth, meaning in life, resilience, self-realization and improved well-being and highlight the dialectic of recovery, an interplay of acceptance and change (reframing). With properly applied personalized narrative psychopharmacotherapy, the patient is capable of changing their beliefs in order to reach a new meaning of life, and thus to facilitate the lowering of symptomatology, its dissaperance and possibly even a cure, whatever that may mean for an individual. Considering its promising results, clinical implications and possible further applications are discussed.