Lives In Progress

Thanks for listening to (mostly) TRUE THINGS the podcast and for following your curiosity about the research studies we discussed in that interview with Dr. Debbie Zelizer to this blog. Here are links to the studies we discussed in the "3 studies" portion of the interview. Happy reading! And please check Episode 2 to find out if Dr. Zelizer changed anything in the telling of her moving story about her favorite patient on the Stonybrook University Hospital /AIDS Unit.

TELL ME A STORY-A CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION OF STORYTELLING IN HEALTH CARE EDUCATION  the Journal of Nurse Education

"The benefits of storytelling include;
 • development of the skills required to follow a narrative thread, tolerating ambiguity and surrendering to the story;
• the adoption of multiple and contradictory points of view;
• an ability to enter the storytellers' reality and to understand how the story teller makes sense of that reality;
• to gain insight into the use of image and metaphor;
• to acknow…

Today a group of people from all over the country and Canada met at the Marriott Hotel a few blocks from the World Trade Center for a conference about resiliency. Here to discuss what it takes to get through the kind of suffering brought about by terrorist acts like those on Sept 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, D.C and in the shadow of the memorial created in their wake, were clinical social workers, creative arts therapists, psychiatrists, lawyers and others involved in ongoing work with the families of people lost that day. But there were also clinicians and researchers who are involved with military families, the atrocity at Sandy Hook elementary school, the Boston Marathon bombing, a terrorist bombing that happened in 1985 off the coast of Ireland, among others. Because the people who do this work stick together, and support one another, and that turns out to be one of the key elements of the resiliency they cultivate in survivors.
    There is a Zulu saying "a person is …

Here is a list of books by Oliver Sacks that I have completed so far:
Awakenings. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. The Mind's Eye, Musicophilia, andso many New Yorker articles I cannot now recount them. I love him from so many different parts of myself. His detailed and generous narratives about the people he treated inspire and energize me as a health care professional and writer. As a music therapist, I am profoundly grateful for his remarkable research into the field and that he focused international attention on the findings that show its benefits - especially in treatment of neurological illnesses  - with his book Musicophilia. And as the daughter of a mother with dementia, his work has been instrumental in helping me understand, accept and manage my mother's cognitive decline. 
    As a music and creative arts therapist I worked in nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals using songs to reach beyond a person's deteriorated or diminished thinking minds and into th…