Davide Ticchi - Narrative Therapy and Chest Wall Deformities

 

 

Pectus excavatum (PE) accounts for 90% of chest wall deformities and has an incidence of about 1 in 300. Growing up with a hole in one’s chest might not be easy, as a kid you may feel afraid of taking your shirt off and as a teen that others make fun of you. Patients interested in surgical or non-surgical treatment may be referred for evaluation by numerous different specialists, but clinical social workers are not currently included in this process.

By going viral on the Internet, the aesthetics masculinity paved the way to a shirtless canon of beauty among males. Dating back to Greek gods and the Adonis evoked by the psychiatrist Pope in the form of the Adonis complex, eventually this re-enacted body beautiful made of Zyzz Shavershian the motivational ‘father of Aesthetics’. Yet in consequence of consecrating an ideal physique substantiated by million Likes and views, those mocked bodies that do not quite fit into this category bear the cross of a stigmatizing social and self-perception.

As therapists, we should gear ourselves up to grant persons an operative methodology to counterbalance pathologising approaches in clinical practice. For this reason, we should reconsider and implement the contribution of narrative medicine (White, 2004), asking the person:

• At what point do you feel you must hide your body?
• When did you feel you are confident with your body and your friends? Were you at that time bold enough to go to sauna with friends?

In the light of recent findings, we propose that PE treatment evaluation should integrate the assessment of a patient’s physical conditions together with a plan of therapeutic conversations, respectively conducted by physicians and clinical social workers familiar with narrative therapy and body image issues. We finally aggrandize the value of narrative in people’s life, granting both practitioner and patients a performative and co-created understanding of clinical social work practice not to fear a different body image from the standard (Goldstein et al., 2009).