Narrative Medicine is Bardic Medicine.

from Laura Hope-Gill, Story Shepherd

As a Creative Writing teacher, I witness transformation all the time. I assign students 800-words each week. Any words. Whatever comes to them, whatever wants to be said or shared or shaken out. I used to “teach” writing. Now I just “allow” writing. I provide books on writing and books of writing. We talk about key craft matters.

Other than this, students find their way without trying to please a professor. They write what leads them. The difference in learning is profound. By simply allowing themselves to write, students relax, and that relaxation marks the start of their healing into their authentic selves. It’s what we need: space to just be. No judgement. No expectations. No instruction beyond support for craft and courage. Each finds their way.

Soon they are wide open with words, able to use the tools–tools their own writing taught them–to approach any topic or experience, unafraid. When I heard the Northern Irish Peacebuilders tell their experience of healing from the Conflict, how telling renews their lives, I saw the depth of storytelling’s power to heal. Nothing escapes it. It is the water of life.

When Narrative Medicine appeared in 2006 (Dr. Rita Charon, M.D. PhD.) and 2007 (Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D.), I saw where things were heading: Medicine was about to return to and integrate its roots in Storytelling. Since 1910 Western Medicine focused only on the science. Over the course of the century, a number of humanist healers within the medical field made the case for the necessity of “narrative,” or storytelling in the healing process. Psychiatrist and professor of Medical Anthropology, Dr. Arthur Kleinman, M.D., made very clear the connection between storytelling and the treatment of chronic illness in The Illness Narratives published in 1988. Author of the groundbreaking What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri, M.D., consistently over the course of decades penned books, essays, and op-ed’s addressing the consequences of a science-only medical field, in addition to editing the excellent Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness crystalized the call of a century for a humanities-informed educational tool for third-year medical students. Today, Narrative Medicine is a recognized, evidence-based discipline.

Narrative Medicine has also reached far beyond its origins in clinical practice. It was clear from the start that the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University Faculty was modeling a multi-disciplinary approach to Clinical Medicine. It was doing so, though, while centering the Western model. One could see that the no-less worthy fields of Philosophy, Poetry, Literature, Film, and Storytelling were now being invited to inform Medicine. What was missing is the fact that these “softer” disciplines heal as well. Close-reading and reflective writing, both staples of the Literature and Religion Departments, are the cornerstones of the Columbia model of Narrative Medicine. Again, Literature was being welcomed to serve Medicine. The movement was not limited to clinical Medicine. Psychology was transforming, too, driven by a different modality, but still a modality known to centuries of poets and writers, that of writing your traumas and turning them into art.

Dr. James Pennebaker launched Expressive Writing in the 1980s. Thousands of studies have since amazed the medical field. The four-step practice of writing our trauma in brief sessions four days in a row for 15 minutes reduces the intensity, the invasiveness, and the paralysis trauma causes. Patients report reduction of anxiety and depression. Pain decreased. The side-effects of chemo lessened. People got their lives back from the one event or series events that they thought had broken them. As a writer and poet who was expected to follow the family footsteps into medicine, I watched the data accrue with much interest. I was watching Medicine heal itself with its own lost story.

I have many times uttered under my breath while reading a study in the AMA or NIH carefully analyzing the data around improved outcomes from story-based healing, “Say it. Say it. Say that Creativity is Medicine.” We know that Science has to be careful. We also know that the deal of the entire Age of Reason was that once Science proves an idea in repeated studies it would accept it as truth and fact. We are at that point now. Scientific evidence proves that healing requires more than Science. This is where we are now. The term Narrative Medicine has been stretched far afield of what Dr. Charon proposed. Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s “Coyote Medicine,” has held more space for expansion, establishing roots in both Cherokee and Gaelic story-hearling traditions. Columbia clung to Narrative Theory until it became clear that the healing was not in the theory of story but in the storytelling, the stripped down, ancient, earth-bound. practice of sharing stories. Creative Writing and Creativity are now proven treatments within medical context.

Here, though, we have to be honest. Narrative Medicine is not the term for what we are talking about now. Nor are Poetry, Stories, and Storytelling handmaidens to the clinical. These are their own fields of medicine and healing with ancient roots long tended by practitioners and scholars for generations. Nor is this new. Up until the 1800’s in Ireland and elsewhare Bardic Schools (Griot for African cultures) trained poets, storytellers, and doctors together, a unified field of healing. This practice of healing by delving into our own stories for the medicine we need, a medicine scripted only for us as individuals is Bardic Healing. It is proven to save and change lives. It is proven to save and change worlds as well.

Storytelling is an archaic healing technique that goes far beyond letting our thoughts flow onto paper. This practice connects us through more than communication and sharing. There are wonders and tools within us for working with this, and when we find how our stories function, we find our way into wisdom. For that, we need poets and storytellers as guides for they know how this side of medicine behaves within. Fortunately, we’re still here. Many of us are even doctors. After all, these trees grow from one root.