Therapeutic Storytelling Intervention™ (TSI) is a life skills, life education and therapeutic process that is having an amazingly positive effect in the lives of young people, especially young people who are struggling socially, developmentally or who have been affected by adverse emotional and/or mental health.

American Educationalist and Family Therapist Ron Phillips (M.F.T.) developed the TSI process. At the time, Ron was concerned that conventional life skills and therapeutic counseling programs were not able to reach the young people they were attempting to help; nor were they effective when applied. Additionally there was the problem of the high cost of many of the programs available both in financial and human resource terms. TSI addressed all of these issues by providing programs that easily engaged children and adolescents, whose effectiveness is well documented and whose levels of compliance are well in advance of other programs currently available. As well as this, because the TSI process is story based, a single facilitator can easily manage a reasonably large group of children over an extended period of time. Resources additional to the core program are minimal and easily acquired.

The TSI process has been used in a variety of settings now for the last 15 years. It uses the age-old art of storytelling as a potent and effective means to rapidly and powerfully engage young people in advantageous therapeutic and developmental processes.

Two purpose-written books, with ancillary material, make TSI unique and substantially different to other child and adolescent therapeutic group processes, especially processes that are narrative based. The material has been specifically designed to meet the topical issues and developmental processes of this age group. The TSI corpus of materials and training enables a facilitator to lead a group through the often complex and difficult territory of adolescent growth and adjustment. The process is full of value-based material that is easily assimilated and that provides a 'blueprint' for successful living.

Since its inception TSI has been used by a number of professional groups including mental health professionals, social workers, educationalists, schoolteachers, justice facilitators and police. In 1999 Sarah Fortune, a Clinical Psychologist at Campbell Lodge, (Counties Manukau’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Outpatient Unit at Middlemore Hospital, the largest hospital in New Zealand), began conducting clinical trials into the effectiveness of TSI amongst their client population. This population is characterized by diverse cultures, is heavily represented by indigenous Maori, and has high levels of psychosocial stress, mental health problems, economic disadvantage and self-harm.

Outcomes from these trials suggest that TSI has an unequaled ability to engage groups that are characterized traditionally by dropout and non-compliance. TSI effectively attends to issues of resistance and hopelessness among young people thereby facilitating healing and enhancing access to wider systems of care, health and well-being. Where there were levels of dysfunction, depression and destructive family relationships the trials showed a positive and substantial shift towards healthy personal and family behaviors in the lives of the young people screened.