She argues that awareness of the details of stories helps us to understand people, and helps prevent our behavior towards patients be dictated by the diagnostic labels they have been given. Through a wider understanding of stories of people with severe mental illness, the public could come to fear them less, and so have less need to insist on a black and white divide between crazy and sane. But the stories we tell of ourselves are what make us who we are, and it is ultimately only through changing those stories that we can change. These ideas are profoundly interesting. They help us see how even when we can't measure the benefit of talk therapy, high quality treatment may require us to see the patient as a person to be engaged in conversation.
True care involves deep interaction between the patient and the therapist.
Baur's tales of her patients illustrate her claims well. But of course they don't prove her claims. It is all too easy to imagine Austad saying that such commitment is admirable, but that we need to face today's realities. The quality of life issues on which Baur focuses are not measurable through statistical surveys, and right now we are not even managing to give half-way decent care to millions of the mentally ill. Even though I tend to agree with Austad's requirement of provable effectiveness in therapy, work like Baur's is indispensable.