Stories Behind Life Stories: Musings of a Memoirist

Abstract

A growing number of elderly people are recording memoirs, and some receive assistance from members of a relatively new trade organization, the Association of Personal Historians. This article identifies experiences and issues arising from one of those members who has a background in nursing, gerontology, and community health. It is obvious from the evidence that there are a multitude of benefits. However, scant literature and this observer verify that there are also risks such as PTSD or depression, which leads to the question of the need for training or an unobtrusive assessment tool for this new profession to avoid undesirable outcomes from life review for elderly clients of memoirists/personal historians.