Decision‐Making as to the Choice of Family Therapy in an Adolescent In‐Patient Setting

Abstract

One hundred adolescent cases admitted to an in‐patient unit were studied to determine how often conjoint family therapy was used. Although the explicit policy of the ward was to use this form of treatment in all cases, in fact only fifty per cent were so treated. This paper reviews the possible explanations for this.

Family Therapy as a Treatment for Children: A Critical Review of Outcome Research

“…Another study of hospitalized adolescents, by Evans, Chagoya, and Rakoff (7), is excluded from Table I because this investigation was primarily concerned with the decision to treat with conjoint family therapy. As the authors point out, the outcome data collected from hospital records showing higher improvement rates for family‐therapy treated cases are contaminated by the differential selection of patients for the family treatment; those adolescents and families who received conjoint family therapy appear to have been “healthier” from the outset.…”

Beginning Work with Families of Hospitalized Adolescents

“…The history of the family therapy movement, dating back to the late 40s and 50s, includes the work of clinicians, theoreticians, and researchers (see 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 34, 41, 45, 51, 55), many of whom developed their clinical expertise as they worked in private, public, or VA hospitals: Ackerman, Bateson, Beels, Boszormenyi‐Nagy, Bowen, Ferber, Framo, Guerin, Haley, Jackson, Lidz, Midelford, Satir, Scheflen, Weakland, Wynne, and Zwerling (18). As the family therapy field developed, attention and investment shifted to outpatient families; inpatient work with patients and families came to be viewed with disinterest, if not disdain, and a sense of hopelessness regarding the possibility of introducing significant change.…”

Estimate of global research trends and performance in family therapy in Social Science Citation Index

“…Moreover, the search keys ''family'', ''families'', ''therapy'', ''treatment'', TP number of total articles; R(%) rank and percentage of words in titles in total articles; N/A not available Estimate of global research trends and performance in family therapy 813 ''family-therapy'', ''adolescent'', and ''practice'' were highly used words in titles. In fact, adolescents drew the attention of family therapists as long ago as the 1970s (Evans et al 1971;Pool and Frazier 1973) and became the mainstream issues of the research field. Therapists use family therapy to treat adolescents for many problems, including depression (Brent et al 1997;Birmaher et al 2000), anorexia nervosa (Eisler et al 1997), drug or substance abuse (Liddle et al 2001;Waldron et al 2001;Waldron and Kaminer 2004;Waldron and Turner 2008), and behavior disorder (Alexander and Parsons 1973;Alexander et al 1976;Kazdin 1997).…”