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Telling your story to mental health worker(s)

Where your story meets your ‘case history’

For many of us, one of the most common situations in which we ‘tell our story’ is to mental
health workers – often many times, to different professionals, in different contexts.

Some of these people – a GP who schedules patients in 15-minute blocks, staff at the
emergency department of your local hospital – work under massive time pressures. In such

settings, there’s often not enough time to share as much of your story as would be needed for
real understanding.

At the other end of the spectrum, in many ‘talking therapies,’ the telling of your story – in
intimate detail – is central to the process. However, even in these contexts, there are ways in

which storytelling is complicated by issues of power, clinical orientation, and different styles
of relating – ranging from very intimate to quite remote.

It is important to be aware of some of these issues because it’s possible to get hurt trying to
tell too much of your story to people who are not employed to listen in the way we may want,

but instead are expected to act swiftly, diagnose, prescribe and look for signs of stress in our
voices and body language rather than really listening to what we are actually saying.

Many clinicians are taught that ‘through science and study they must know’ – to them, story
is not science.

Turning our stories into ‘a history’ – the inevitable medicalisation of our stories

The difference between ‘taking a history’ and ‘sharing our story’ is a matter of perspective.

When a mental health worker ‘takes a history’ the perspective is clinical – they listen, ask
certain questions and record what they understand from what we are saying, using clinical

concepts, medical jargon and sometimes judgment.

Even when we try to emphasise those parts of our story that are important to us, the clinician

may be listening for different information that they’ve been taught to listen for as part of their

history-taking recipe. While this can be both necessary and helpful, it can also feel like
they’re not really listening, because they are not listening in the way we might want to be

heard!

This can also be a form of co-option – not only of the content and language we use but also of
the emphasis: what is important and what is not. Some of us challenge this, some of us find

the predictability deeply reassuring, while others have no idea what’s going on (or don’t

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