Illness narratives in counselling—narrative medicine and narrative ethics

Abstract

The attention to illness narratives echoes the narrative turn in the humanities. This chapter explores the implications of counselling and confronts the narrative medicine approach with the correlated, yet distinct, concept of narrative ethics. It considers ethics standards of counselling and, more specifically, models of decision-making that counsellors use as orientation and ethical guidelines. Narrative ethics is one way to bridge the experiences and value the moral norms that govern decision making. This chapter explores ways to integrate a narrative ethics approach as part of ethical counselling to ensure that both individual experiences and the normative dimensions of actions are included in the conversations. While non-directive counselling emphasizes the moral agency of the individual and calls for the respect of the client concerning their choices, the introduced model of decision making is better equipped to attend to the ethical dimension of counselling.