KAREN GOLD PhD MSW RSW
Pronouns: she/her
Narrative Medicine for Clients, Clinicians, and Communities
Short Bio:
Karen is a registered social worker, educator, and narrative medicine practitioner. She currently teaches in the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.
About Me:
As a newly graduated clinical social worker in the 1990s I was drawn to narrative therapy and the idea of “story” as a lens to understand people’s lives. This was soon followed by an interest in the field of narrative healthcare, inspired by discovering Rita Charon’s book Narrative Medicine in my hospital library.
I have been incorporating narrative approaches into classroom and clinical teaching for more than 25 years and have written publicly about struggles in my own professional practice. I ran arts-based and reflective writing workshops for clinicians, educators, and learners at Women’s College Hospital (where I worked as the collaborative learning lead). One of my favourite projects was a digital storytelling project for clinical instructors and students on placement which explored professional identity and notions of caring.
I taught for many years in the Health, Arts & Humanities (HAH) Program at the University of Toronto where I developed the narrative healthcare unit of the Inter-professional Certificate in HAH for health professional students.
In 2010 I entered an inter-disciplinary doctoral program for practitioners through Tilburg University in The Netherlands and the Taos Institute. I spent the next few years immersed in reading and thinking about narrative inquiry in healthcare and reflective writing by clinicians. During my PhD studies, I certified as a workshop leader with Amherst Writers and Artists and did advanced narrative medicine training at Columbia University.
Informed by my almost 30 years in healthcare, I have a keen interest in empathy, clinical communication, and building resilience among patients, practitioners, and health systems. Scholarly interests include illness narratives, narrative pedagogy, memoir, and poetic inquiry.