Healing with Stories: Designing empowering narratives for informal caregivers. A Method Demonstration (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The Transformative Storytelling Technique is an innovative top-down approach to narrative therapy that aims to provide building blocks for creating flourishing narratives for target groups or populations. This approach acts as a facilitator for implementing the human-centred design in developing digital self-help tools for larger samples or target groups. OBJECTIVE This study applied the Transformative Storytelling technique as a new approach in mental health, to develop empowering audio narratives for informal caregivers. METHODS A narrative inquiry has been conducted with seventeen informal caregivers who completed a semi-structured interview “Caregiver Life Story” acquiring about the beginning of the role, the rising action, and the critical point of the role. This inquiry was guided by the Transformative Storytelling Technique, and it aimed to collect the data relevant to creating fictional stories based on real-life themes. RESULTS Twenty-five overall themes have been distinguished across three a-priori set categories, providing narrative building blocks for the informal caregiver life stories. The final empowering caregiver life story was created as an example for this study, demonstrating the application of the Transformative Storytelling Technique in an informal care context. CONCLUSIONS The creation of empowering stories, for populations or target groups in mental health care, requires a unified and guided approach that will follow clear guidelines and storytelling principles. Transformative Storytelling Technique is a first of its kind in the mental health context and is an initial step in enabling and supporting the creation of meaningful stories and the development of relatable but productive narratives. Such narratives have the potential to serve across media and digital platforms for supporting and improving wellbeing, and potentially triggering self-change in the target group or population. CLINICALTRIAL No