Family Health Center of San Diego

When a family member is diagnosed with cancer or faces challenges from living with a disability, the impact reverberates throughout the family, leaving no one untouched. How should a clinician help the parents of a child who is critically ill? How can a marital relationship be skewed and a child's well-being compromised when a parent becomes permanently disabled - and how can a clinician best intervene in such cases? In presenting his clinically powerful Family Systems Illness Model, John Rolland addresses these and other vital questions of importance to families in which there is a member with a major illness or disability. Rolland's integrative treatment model is based on his experience with more than five hundred families, first as Founding Director of the Center for Illness in Families while at Yale University and currently at the University of Chicago. He applies it to a broad range of disorders that affect adults and children over the entire course of an illness and at all stages of the life cycle. Richly illustrated with varied case examples, Families, Illness, and Disability is unique both in describing this comprehensive model and in providing a highly practical guide to effective intervention. Through a normative, preventive lens, the book's useful framework shows how the biopsychosocial demands of different illness and disabilities create particular strains on the family, how the stages of an illness affect the family, how family legacies of loss and illness shape their coping responses, and how family belief systems play a crucial role in the ability to manage health and illness. Practitioners will learn how to help families live well despite physical limitations and theuncertainties of threatened loss, how to encourage empowering rather than shame-based illness narratives, how to rewrite rigid caregiving scripts, how to encourage intimacy and maximize autonomy for all family members.

Handbook of RELATIONAL DIAGNOSIS AND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY PATTERNS "A major contribution to our understanding of how families work." -- Allen Frances, MD Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Chair, DSM-IV Task Force ."..the biggest changes in the DSM-V--in a decade or so--will be in the area of...family or systems (relationship) diagnosis." -- John McIntyre Past President, American Psychiatric Association It has long been known that an individual's psychiatric and behavioral problems are often played out in and exacerbated by problems in his or her personal relationships. Nevertheless, traditional psychiatric classification schemes such as the DSM and ICD have willfully neglected the relational component of mental health. As a consequence, no standardized classification system with which to assess distressed relationships has ever been developed. This lack of a common language has, in turn, led to the many well-known clinical, legal, and health insurance difficulties that often seriously curtail patients' ability to receive the care they deserve. The time has come to provide such a common language, and this book is the first giant step in that direction. The Handbook of Relational Diagnosis and Dysfunctional Family Patterns is the first book to offer a comprehensive clinically based typology of couples-centered, parent-child, and family relational dysfunctions. It is the collaborative effort of more than 50 leaders in the field of relational therapy, many of whom have been actively involved in the APA Division of Family Psychology Task Force on Diagnosis and Treatment and the interorganizational Coalition on Family Diagnosis. Representing many differentdisciplines and schools of thought, these theorists and researchers share their insights into and expertise in relational assessment, treatment, and classification.