A Family Approach to Psychiatric Disorders

This work reflects the remarkable changes in both psychiatry and family therapy over the past several decades. This book forges together psychiatric and family therapy, bridging a gap created by the erroneous belief that these two realms are somehow incompatible. Uniquely organised, "A Family Approach to Psychiatric Disorders" presents a chapter on family therapy for each of the major DSM-IV disorders. Psychiatric trainees as well as seasoned mental health professionals should find this book useful in work with families of patients who present with psychiatric disorders. Rather than blame families, it treats them as the essential unit of study, concern and therapy. Important but often neglected topics such as intimacy, emotions, countertransference traps, gender, ethnicity, posterity, and family loyalty are discussed. This book is relevant to family therapists, and individual therapists should find it comparably valuable. It increases their clinical effectiveness not only by helping them to look beyond an individual's presenting symptoms, but also by shedding light on the impact - often the burden - of the individual's problems on the rest of the family.