The clinical usefulness of life charts, a utopia?

A century ago, Adolf Meyer encouraged his fellow psychiatrists to use life charts. Exploratory research with fourteen medical and psychiatric patients, drawing on the experience of Royal Holloway College in analyzing life events, showed that the richness of non-directive interviews, compared with questionnaires covering relationships, activities, living environments, etc., did not come at the expense of the reliability of the data, and that providing the patient with his or her life chart and biographical summary strengthened the therapeutic alliance. The average rate of awareness of major life events by doctors was 39 percent, and this rate per patient varied from 18 to 56 percent. It seemed that this approach could improve the understanding of an illness or lead to a review of its diagnosis (one psychiatric case in the study). While it is true that the time required to listen to a life story, and then write the summary documents, can be a daunting task for most psychiatric clinics, for certain patients the co-construction of the life chart and the summary could function like mediated psychotherapy. These observations suggest that this approach should indeed be pursued in psychiatry, and that work should be done to identify and evaluate the categories of patients who could benefit from this method, as well as the benefits it could offer in other medical disciplines—in the therapeutic education of diabetic patients or in the treatment of cancer patients, for instance.