The unexamined life is not worth living.1 - -Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology Greek philosopher in Athens (469 BC-399 BC)

In this issue of Topics in Language Disorders (TLD), authors share elements of qualitative research on narratives that convey the essence of what it is like to be an adult living with a communication disorder or supporting someone who has one. This issue was conceptualized by guest editors, Jacqueline Hinckley and Michelle Bourgeois, on the basis of papers presented at an international meeting of the International Narrative Medicine Network in June 2013 in London, England. The result is a compilation of articles that exemplify the journal's mission to use research to improve practice with people with communication disorders. It is particularly meaningful because it does so through the perspectives and stories of people who live with language problems and other communication disorders as interpreted by researchers from multiple disciplines and nations (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States in this issue). These elements align perfectly with the mission of TLD to connect research and practice with outreach across disciplines and globally.

It has now been 10 years since I took over the editing helm of the journal. As the Editorial Board and I have continued to address the journal's goals to share new ideas and the evidence for improving practice, we have sought to increase the scholarly rigor of the journal while maintaining its reputation for practical implications that can guide clinical practice. As a testimony to our success, I am happy to report that this year, the journal's impact factor has climbed over from 1.0 to 1.625 (from 0.683 previously). This objective measure of the journal's broader impact (measured as average of citations per article) is particularly important given our goal to make a practical difference in how services are delivered to people with language disorders across the age span. Dissemination of information about evidence-based practices only happens effectively when researchers, first, write about their work, and when others, then, review and cite this work to bring it to the attention of a broader world. We think that this new issue follows in that tradition and that it will generate further discussion and research.

The topic of this issue of TLD, "Listening to the Narratives of Adults With Communication Disorders," is particularly interesting because of the wide range of adult populations it addresses as well as the diversity in broader goals that narrative therapies could affect. That is the reason for my title to this editorial, "Nobody Owns Narrative, Except the Narrator." By this I mean that narratives, and the tools used to elicit narratives from clients for therapeutic purposes, are not the exclusive purview of any one professional discipline. As exemplified in this issue, narratives are used for multiple reasons with multiple populations by professionals from multiple disciplines.

This journal traditionally has been read primarily by speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Yet, the contributors to the journal and this issue are members of interdisciplinary teams that include psychologists and others as well as SLPs. Another reason for this title is that it acknowledges the ownership the narrator has over his or her story. One of the clinical messages that can be abstracted from the articles in this issue is that the role of the clinician is to help the client tell his or her personal story using his or her own words and finding his or her own meanings. This is not a trivial point, especially when the person has a language or communication disorder. Using stories to reflect on one's life can be affected by a variety of significant communicative challenges. The authors of the varied articles in this issue describe uses of narratives in therapeutic interactions with people with aphasia (Hersh, 2015; Hinckley, 2015), traumatic brain injury (Fraas, 2015), dementia (Guendouzi, Davis, & Maclagan, 2015), stuttering (Ryan, O'Dwyer, & Leahy, 2015), and caregivers of people affected by acquired brain injury (Isaki, Brown, Aleman, & Hackstaff, 2015).

Given differences across populations, the commonalities that emerge from the articles in this issue are at least as important as the distinctions. Some of those commonalities have to do with maintaining one's sense of identity and the story of one's life, given challenges of unexpected plot changes. Each article also is a testimony to the importance of reflecting on or reexamining one's life, consistent with the famous words by Socrates in the introductory quotation to this editorial. Making sense of the broader meanings of one's life is something that narrative discourse can capture as no other genre can. This issue makes that point in multiple meaningful ways.

-Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD, CCC-SLP

Editor-in-Chief

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