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The Clinical Manual of Couples and Family Therapy presents a conceptual framework for engaging families of psychiatric patients. It outlines practical, evidence-based family therapy skills that make it easier for clinicians to effectively integrate families into the treatment process. Moreover, it reestablishes the role of the psychiatrist as the leader of the team of professionals providing mental health care to patients in need.
The underlying assumption in this concise manual is that most psychiatric symptoms or conditions evolve in a social context, and families can be useful in identifying the history, precipitants, and likely future obstacles to the management of presenting problems. The book clarifies the clinical decision-making process for establishing family involvement in patient care in different clinical settings, and it outlines distinct steps in family assessment and treatment within a biopsychosocial organizing framework that can be applied to all families, regardless of the patient's presenting problems. The book's approach is based on a broad model of family functioning, which provides a multidimensional description of families and has validated instruments to assess family functioning from both internal and external perspectives. Unique features and benefits of the manual include:
• A focus on one consistent model of assessment and treatment that can be applied to a wide range of psychiatric conditions and clinical settings
• Numerous case examples, tables, and charts throughout the text to further highlight the material
• A summary of key concepts at the end of each chapter
• A companion DVD, keyed to discussion in the text, that demonstrates how to perform a family assessment and treatment
All psychiatrists should be proficient in assessing the social and familial context in which a patient's psychiatric illness evolves. The Clinical Manual of Couples and Family Therapy is a practical guide designed to facilitate a clinician's ability to evaluate and treat couples and families.
My training in family and couples therapy has mostly been drawn from photocopies of various books and journal articles and I appreciate that this book provides an efficient yet complete framework for basic therapeutic practices with family members. Before reading this book, I often felt overwhelmed by how to organize the information I would get when meeting with families, but now I feel more confident in my ability to work more effectively with them. Listing references at the end of the chapter makes for smoother reading than citing them in the body of the text. However, the title may be misleading because the book does not make a clear distinction between family therapy and couples therapy.
— Aaron Plattner, M.D.
Gabor I. Keitner, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine and Brown University/Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.
Alison Margaret Heru, M.D., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado.
Ira D. Glick, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
A Guide for Using the Text and DVD
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Healthy Family Functioning
Chapter 3. Family Research
Chapter 4. Family Assessment
Chapter 5. Site-Specific Family Assessment
Chapter 6. Biopsychosocial Formulation
Chapter 7. Diagnostic Reasoning and Clinical Decision-Making Process
Chapter 8. Family/Couples Therapy: Models
Chapter 9. Problem-Centered Systems Therapy of the Family
Chapter 10. Integrating Family Treatment Into Biopsychosocial Care
Chapter 11. Family Interventions With Specific Disorders
Chapter 12. Special Situations
Chapter 13. Training in Family Skills and Family Therapy
Chapter 14. Conclusions and Future Directions
Index