Writing and Health Care - (Approaches to Writing) by Janelle Adsit (Hardcover)

About the Book

A practical introduction to the fields of arts in health, health humanities, and narrative medicine from the perspective of a creative writer, this book teaches artists, patients, and health practitioners how to exercise the benefits of aesthetic thinking.

Book Synopsis

How can arts-based approaches benefit patients and professionals within the health care system? Can the skills creative writers use to craft their work be applied more broadly to enhance the wellbeing of those in need of medical care?

This book offers a practical introduction to how these ideas can be employed within health care settings as treatments, to foster more empathetic and humane interactions between patients and practitioners, and to help understand the personal narratives of others. Combining aesthetic theory with practice, Writing and Health Care reflects on the role of creative expression in bettering the life and well-being of oneself and others. Touching on areas as diverse as health humanities, narrative medicine, creative therapies and transformative language arts, it introduces a range of genres including graphic medicine, illness narratives, "sick lit" and more. Foregrounding health justice and thinking with intersectional communities at the forefront, this book enables readers to write in ways that resist limited thinking, contribute to the transformation of health systems and processes, and generate works that promote forms of expression with therapeutic effects for patients and practitioners alike.

Review Quotes

In Writing and Healthcare: Creative and Critical Approaches, Janelle Adsit offers helpful resources for those not only in writing or health professions, but also those allied across family and community health, health humanities, arts in medicine, global public health, and more-using critical and thoughtful pedagogies to address health's wholistic nature alongside the urgency to address global health inequities. Learners and teachers along a spectrum will benefit from this book, allowing sincere dialogue to occur across disciplines, geographies, institutions, and communities, toward more inclusive understandings of healing and its related professions.
Robin M. McCrary, Associate Teaching Professor, Syracuse University, USA

Janelle Adsit's research offers valuable insights into the field of creative writing studies, particularly by highlighting its intersections with writing therapy, art therapy, narrative medicine, and related areas. Her work reveals the unique contributions that writing can make toward personal growth and physical and mental well-being-a dimension that is increasingly prioritized by Chinese researchers in creative writing. Adsit's research challenges the notion of writing as an exclusive domain of "Romantic genius," instead presenting it as a potential inherent in all individuals. From her findings, we can infer that the communal and urban practices of creative writing serve as transformative literary actions, fostering creativity and facilitating meaningful social engagement.
Weidong Liu, School of Humanities, Wenzhou University, China

About the Author

Janelle Adsit is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, USA. She is editor of the anthology Critical Creative Writing; co-author of Writing Intersectional Identities; and author of Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2019). She also has written a book of poems titled Unremitting Entrance (2015). In the community and with her local Hospice, Adsit co-facilitates writing workshops that address stress, pain, and grief. As an extension of these workshops, Adsit's research is located within the fields of Arts in Health and Narrative Medicine.