Symptoms of depression in children part of the “snowflake” generation and their input for the functioning of the whole family. Narrative research of modern families

In the article I analyze the problem of mental health about children of the generation of "snowflakes". The subject of the article is the problem of child depression affecting the whole family system. The main symptoms of this disease are presented. They are discussed in detail with their impact on family relationships. The main functions of the family were recalled, as they gave the structure for the analysis of narrative tests. A lot of attention was paid to the description of the impact of depression on the life of the whole family, including marriage, contact with children, social contacts, changes in the family's activity and material situation, as well as emotional reactions of family members. The analysis of narrative tests shows the family's reactions to the child's disease.

Running In (and Out) the Family Postcolonial Family Novels in Perspective

The genre of the family novel can be identified in many postcolonial literary cultures. Initially, it was often read as an example of “national allegory” (Jameson 1986), thus considering family narrative in a tight relationship with postcolonial nation-building, but this theoretical framework has been later criticised from different perspectives, ranging from post-national to feminist critiques. Furthermore, the genre of the postcolonial family novel has been refashioned due to the emergence of diasporic narratives, leading to the diffusion of the “postcolonial fictions of adoption” (McLeod 2006). Nowadays, the high competition in the global literary market – namely, with family novels and sagas in the US literary market – drives this genre towards highly individualised, as well as hybridised, outcomes. While focusing, in particular, on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Lara ([1997] 2009) by Bernardine Evaristo, this survey of family novels across different literary traditions aims to show the intrinsic porosity, as well as the strenuous resistance, of the genre.

Public Performance of Private Interviews: Reinserting the Self into the Family Narrative

Serban Oliver Tataru and Alfred Guzzetti are filmmakers that investigate on camera the role of memory in the construction of family history. They interview family members, gather old home movies and family photographs, and dig for public archival footage, in an effort to assume their position within a personal historical continuum, and to affirm their agency within their familial community. In their creative affirmation of generational subjectivity, they push against accepted familial narratives, and use the camera as a surgical tool that troubles lingering wounds beyond the surface of old images. In Anatomy of a Departure (2012), Romanian-German filmmaker Serban Oliver Tataru interviews his parents about their decision to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania while he was a teenager, scrutinizing on camera the conditions and consequence of a life-changing decision. While the dynamic of filming one’s own family is reminiscent of home movie tropes, and the tension built around sharing delicate memories reveals an intimacy usually intended to remain private, the film proposes a multilayered performance of the authorial self. As the film reveals a self-portrait set against the familial portrait (Marianne Hirsch), an inherent performative element acts as the necessary mediator between private and public, between ethic, aesthetic and politic. Negotiating between a restorative and a reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), Tataru proposes a live performance of homecoming.

Social work in palliative care

Palliative social work is an evolving specialty which continues to be enriched by practitioners globally. Social workers practise in diverse settings and have the opportunity to extend palliative care values and processes beyond hospitals and hospices to home care, nursing homes, prisons, and senior centres. This chapter discusses social work values and core principles as a foundation upon which to integrate palliative care, creating a rich opportunity to serve patients, families, teams, institutions, and communities. It begins with an introduction to the history of social work in palliative care and moves on to discuss the convergence and synergy of social work and palliative care, and the need to create models of care to meet global needs. Assessment and interventions are introduced with attention to confidentiality, culture, family meetings, and the roles and responsibilities within team work. Finally, a patient family narrative is presented.

Family History and Searching for Hidden Trauma—A Personal Commentary

Background: Searching family history is now popular through increased internet access coinciding with a need for understanding identity. Prior unresolved war trauma can help explain impacts on subsequent generations and the need to search for family narrative, particularly in refugee families. This paper explores the search for trauma narratives through personal family history research, with links to community groups. Method: The author’s own Polish family history research provides examples of trauma and loss from World War II in Poland. This is supplemented by quotes from an existing interview study of second-generation Poles to amplify themes and indicate their wider community relevance.

The Legacy

This final chapter follows the Della Torre bloodline through the eighteenth century. Giovanni pursues has a successful career as Bishop of Veglia. Giulio marries Antonio Marchesi’s daughter Caterina in 1600, establishing the Udine line, and the family regains ownership of Palazzo Torriani. Sigismondo, head of the Gorizian line, dies the following year. The vast patrimony of both lines flows to his great-grandson, Carlo II, by right of primogeniture. Carlo’s grandson, Lucio Antonio, becomes heir to a toxic heritage of violence and entitlement and commits a litany of atrocities. Venice banishes him in 1717 and orders Palazzo Torriani to be razed to the ground. He is executed in 1723 for conspiring to murder his wife. His son, Lucio Sigismondo, recoups much of the patrimony and purchases a new Palazzo Torriani in Udine. Compiling extensive genealogies and organizing archival documents, he rewrites the family narrative and restores the good name of the Della Torre.

A Tale of Two Stories: Unsettling a Settler Family’s History in Aotearoa New Zealand

On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pā, home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their people. Having contributed to the military campaign against the pā, he returned some years later as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land in Aotearoa New Zealand. None of this detail appears in any of the stories I was raised with. I grew up Pākehā (i.e., a descendant of people who came to Aotearoa from Europe as part of the process of colonisation) and so my stories tend to conform to orthodox settler narratives of ‘success, inevitability, and rights of belonging’. This article is an attempt to right that wrong. In it, I draw on insights from the critical family history literature to explain the nature, purposes and effects of the (non)narration of my great-grandfather’s participation in the military invasion of Parihaka in late 1881. On the basis of a more historically comprehensive and contextualised account of the acquisition of three family farms, I also explore how the control of land taken from others underpinned the creation of new settler subjectivities and created various forms of privilege that have flowed down through the generations. Family histories shape the ways in which we make sense of and locate ourselves in the places we live, and those of us whose roots reach back to the destructive practices of colonisation have a particular responsibility to ensure that such narratives do not conform to comfortable type. This article is an attempt to unsettle my settler family narrative.

A ‘Rich Fabric of Some Sort, Which No One Can Fully Comprehend [or] Fully Own’

This chapter considers what ‘Levantine remains’ yield for post-millennial Palestine, particularly in the context of a seemingly moribund ‘two-state solution.’ It takes up the regional optic of a multi-generational extended-family narrative in Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), his sister Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005), and his mother-in-law Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman (2009). The chapter contends that the Said-Makdisi-Cortas family collectively summon, through memoirs and paratexts, a ‘lost’ or otherwise ‘forgotten’ Levantine world. In archiving ways in which historically-produced ‘facts on the ground’ have etiolated Levantine identities, these authors resuscitate embedded, expansive models of being Palestinian.