Family Therapy

Stuart Tiegel, MSW
Family Therapy is a topic covered in the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Guide.

To view the entire topic, please or purchase a subscription.

Official website of the Johns Hopkins Antibiotic (ABX), HIV, Diabetes, and Psychiatry Guides, powered by Unbound Medicine. Johns Hopkins Guide App for iOS, iPhone, iPad, and Android included. Explore these free sample topics:

Johns Hopkins Guides

-- The first section of this topic is shown below --

DESCRIPTION

  • Psychotherapy in our culture has largely been thought of as individual psychotherapy (IT).
  • IT is seen as "monadic" by nature, and 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.
    • The focus in FT involves shifting the treatment unit away from a unit of one to a more complex system of relationships involving couples, families and sometimes multiple families.
      • "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)
    • FT was driven by the need to treat more patients efficiently and in the context in which they lived their lives.
      • Leading to a paradigm shift in some areas of psychiatric treatment[1]

-- To view the remaining sections of this topic, please or purchase a subscription --

Last updated: October 22, 2014