DESCRIPTION

• Psychotherapy has largely been thought of as individual psychotherapy (IT) that is "monadic" by nature, whereas family therapy (FT) is seen as "dyadic", "triadic", etc.
• FT is not IT with more than one person in the therapy room, but a different way of viewing human problems and psychiatric treatment that shifts treatment away from a unit of one towards a more complex system of relationships involving couples, families and sometimes multiple families.
• FT was driven by the need to treat more patients efficiently and in the context in which they lived their lives.[1]

"There is no such thing as the individual, we are all pieces of a family."

-- Carl Whitaker, M.D., a pioneering psychiatrist in FT (American Orthopsychiatry Conference, 1979)