David Epston

David Epston (born 30 August 1944) is a New Zealand social worker and therapist, co-director of the Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand, visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy University, an honorary clinical lecturer in the Department of Social Work, University of Melbourne, and an affiliate faculty member in the Ph.D program in Couple and Family Therapy at North Dakota State University.

Epston and his late friend and colleague Michael White (social worker and psychotherapist) are known as originators of narrative therapy.

David Epston was born in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, where he grew up.

He began studies at the University of British Columbia, and left Canada in 1963 when he was 19, arriving in New Zealand in 1964.

In New Zealand Epston started working as a senior social worker in an Auckland hospital.

In the late 1970s Epston and Michael White led the flowering of family therapy within Australia and New Zealand.

Together they started developing their ideas, continuing during the 1980s, and eventually in 1990 published Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, the first major text in what came to be known as narrative therapy.

From 1981 to 1987 he worked as consultant family therapist at the Leslie Centre, run by Presbyterian Support Services in Auckland.

From 1987 to the present he has been co-director of The Family Therapy Centre in Auckland.

In 1997 following the publication of Playful Approaches to Serious Problems Epston, along with his co-authors Dean Lobovits and Jennifer Freeman, initiated the website Narrative Approaches.

It includes series of authored and co-authored papers, artwork, and poetry in the form of an "Archive of Resistance: Anti-Anorexia/anti-Bulimia."