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Family therapy

Family therapy can significantly decrease relapse rates for the schizophrenic family member. In high-stress families, schizophrenic

patients given standard aftercare relapse 50-60% of the time in the first year out of hospital. Supportive family therapy can reduce

this relapse rate to below 10 percent. This therapy encourages the family to convene a family meeting whenever an issue arises, in

order to discuss and specify the exact nature of the problem, to list and consider alternative solutions, and to select and implement

the consensual best solution. It is designed to help families cope with both large-scale problems and smaller, everyday problems.

The purpose of family therapy is to remedy issues within a family or to contribute to overcoming existing dysfunction within afamily. 

This therapy which looks at the entire family as a complex system having its own language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs, and

patterns. Each family member plays a part in the system and family systems therapy helps an individual discover how their family

operated, their role in the system, and how it affects them in their current family and in relationships outside the family.

There Different Types of Family Therapy 

amily therapy comes in three main forms. The most common type of family therapy is based on the family systems theory, whichuggests that a family is a unit that works better in unison rather than separately. Other forms of family therapy focus on the

sychological dynamics of the family and behavioral issues of individual family members.

Family therapy is basically what the term implies. It is a form of therapy in which the counselor works with the entire primary family

at once instead of individual members. Often, a family therapist will even refuse to begin a session if one or more members of the

family aren't present. The essential theory behind family therapy is that a family is a system made up of parts and a problem with

one of the parts (or members of the family) affects the entire system. Families try to maintain homeostasis. This means that

families try to keep things stable or the same. If one member of the family does anything out of the "norm" for that particular

family, the members of that family will fight against him or her to bring things back the way they used to be. This is problematic,

especially if one member of the family is in therapy and learning new coping styles, yet the family is fighting their healthy changes.

Family therapists believe there are no isolated problems. Families often enter therapy with an "identified patient" or "scapegoat."

They blame one or more individuals for all the problems. Family therapists, however, believe that a problem with one member ofthe family reflects deeper issues and problems in the entire family system. In other words, the family member with the problem

behavior is bringing attention to the family in order to help the whole system.

The first family theorists started by studying schizophrenia in families. They discovered that families with an identified

schizophrenic member also had pathological communication patterns (in other words, they had poor communication skills that

resulted in a variety of problems.) This led theorists to believe that it was the pathological communication and behaviors in the

family that caused the schizophrenia in the first place. The family literally "drove the person crazy." Theorists such as Gregory

Bateson explained that this was accomplished by the use of double binds in the family. A double bind is a situation in which a person

is given conflicting messages and punished no matter what they do- just like the expression "damned if you do and damned if you

don't." Bateson documented the following situation in a paper about the double binds in schizophrenia,

"A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was

glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked,"Don't you love me anymore?"He then blushed, and she said, "Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your

feelings."

In this situation the son gave his mother a hug. Interpreting his mother's stiffened reaction to mean she was upset with him, he drew

back. After drawing back, his mother contradicted her body language by suggesting that her son didn't love her anymore. He was, in

a sense, punished for showing affection and then punished for not showing affection. Consequently, after this encounter he

experienced another schizophrenic episode and had to be taken back to the ward. Several interactions like this one over the space

of many years is very detrimental to the development of a child. The child may grow up not being able to relate to people or trust

that people mean what they say they mean. In the next section, we will take a look at the historical precursors of family therapy.

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