Family therapy, parenting, psychotherapy, marital therapy

As increasing numbers of gay/lesbian parents and their children enter into "stepfamily-like" relationships with a gay partner, they are beginning to seek therapy for difficulties peculiar to stepfamily living involving two same-sex partners. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced by gay parents and children in a step-relationship, and seeks to sensitize mental health professionals to issues specific to intervention with such families. Effective therapy with these families requires that therapists be sensitive to their personal biases and prejudices with regard to gay men and women in general and as parents, and be aware that such attitudes can intrude and negatively affect the therapeutic process and its outcomes...

The following study on family groups of patients with Huntington's chorea shows the changed psychosocial life patterns resulting from the disease of the marriage partner, as seen from the viewpoint of the other partner. It is evident that "family groups" are not necessarily self-sustaining, and cannot manage the additional strain without outside help; as a matter of fact, the limits of familial self-help become very apparent if the partner cannot cope with the burden. In this manner, family groups actually emphasise and underline the need for external social support...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The authors describe various methods of marital therapy in use today. Although absence of a unifying conceptual scheme in the past has hampered developments in this field, the increasing acknowledgment by psychiatrists of the important effect of the environmental system on thoughts, feelings, and behavior has facilitated a therapeutic approach stressing not only a person's intrapsychic conflicts but current environmental, family, and spouse-related phenomena. The authors discuss three dimensions of marital psychodynamics--power, intimacy, and marital boundary setting--and relate them to the marital life cycle and to four classifications of the marital relationship: 1) rules for defining power, 2) parental stage, 3) level of intimacy, and 4) personality style and psychiatric terminology...

This paper describes a model of treatment for families in which one child has been given the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Male and female therapists adopt structured roles that are used as a paradigm for exploring family patterns. The paradigm employs a three-generational hypothesis that defines schizophrenia as a lifelong, restricting mode of relating, involving the primary family triad, that makes the child vulnerable to repeated psychotic episodes. Therapy is directed at the difficulties of autonomous development within the family by focusing on differentiating the relationship between nuclear and extended family members, expecially defining and strengthening generational and sexual boundaries...

A case of a 12 1/2-year-old female fire-setter is presented. The symptom was the result of long term developmental problems precipitated by the onset of puberty. Psychoanalytically oriented individual psychotherapy combined with marital and family therapy were the modes of treatment. The continuous struggle to establish a therapeutic alliance with an early adolescent is discussed. A patient whose main mechanisms of defense are repression, suppression, denial, and projection presents a challenge for the therapist...

Four patients demonstrating phobic symptoms occurring in the context of maladaptive marriages are presented. Thorough historical data collection is stressed. Similarities in family backgrounds and personality styles emerge in these cases and are discussed in relation to genesis of symptoms within the marital relationships. A psychotherapeutic approach is described and results of treatment examined.

Gaming-simulation is being developed foruse in a variety of aspects of health care. A mental health diagnostic and therapeutic application is described for problems in parent-teenager relations; it features gaming, videotaping of interactions, and extensive discussion. Two applications which elucidate the nature of discord between couples and two applications for work-group problems are also described. Gaming-simulation is used in basic and continuing education of health professionals for such issues as problems of dying patients and the aged, and prevention of coronary heart disease...

From a population of 662 children 12 years of age and under, seen at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, during the years 1970 to 1974, 34 severely depressed children were identified who were also self-abusive and/or suicidal. Case study revealed fragmented, pathological homes, where the children's affect disorders and behaviors were symptomatic of acute family breakdown, marital disharmony, and observed and experienced violence, both verbal and physical. Follow-up on all available children, at least three years posttreatment, revealed that no child had committed suicide...

This review covers the literature that has emerged specifically on the family treatment of drug abuse problems. Following a brief discussion of patterns and structures prevalent in drug-abusing families, 68 different studies or programs (discussed in 74 papers) are compared as to their techniques and results. These are categorized within the following modalities: marital treatment, group treatment for parents, concurrent parent and identified patient treatment, treatment with individual families (both inpatient and outpatient), sibling-oriented treatment, multiple family therapy, and social network therapy...