Families of the Mentally Ill

With current treatment philosophy favoring community care for those with major mental illnesses, professionals have been experimenting with a variety of techniques for providing help to the beleaguered families of the mentally ill, what has been lacking is a clear understanding of the family's own perception of and experience with mental illness. Families of the Mentally Ill is designed to help professionals become more sensitive to the family dilemma so that they can develop more soundly based techniques for working with them. Perceiving the family as experiencing a profound tragedy in their lives and interpreting their behavior as adaptive responses to this tragedy, the editors have assembled specialists from the fields of psychiatry, psychology, education, nursing, and rehabilitation. In collaboration, they define a theoretical orientation of coping and adaption that can help professionals understand and respond to the ramifications of mental illness from a family perspective. The volume examines the family experience both historically and cross-culturally in Part I. Calling for a paradigm shift, this section presents an examination of current family theories and finds that they all tend to be deficient in some ways, and offers a comprehensive explanation of the subjective experience and objective burdens of mental illness that has been lacking. Part II provides a thorough discussion of the application of the theory of coping and adaptation to promote understanding of families as they come to grips with mental illness in a relative, and Part III examines the mental health services that families perceive they need, covering models of family practice that are appropriate to adaptation theory as well as the relevant question of how practitioners are to be appropriately trained for this new role. Opening up new issues for research, this volume will be an invaluable reference for psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, nurses, rehabilitation workers, and students in these fields whose work brings them into contact with the mentally ill and their families.