Parents of Adolescents with Mental Disorders: Improving Their Caregiving Experience

Effectiveness of Brief Psychodynamic Therapy With Children and Adolescents: An Outcome Study

“…The parents' supportive intervention offered in the Neuropsychiatric Service aimed to help parents recognize their child's and their own emotional difficulties (63,64). Whilst the children and adolescents' psychopathology had improved after therapy; in our study, adults' parenting skills did not seem to follow the same trend and no positive change was evaluated in the domain of family empowerment.…”

Triadic Interactions in Families of Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa and Families of Adolescents with Internalizing Disorders

“…It is not only the influence of each parent separately that would provide a matrix for the daughter’s emotional development but also, and even more significantly, the affective regulation of the parental couple, as expressed in the complex relational dynamics of the triad (Kooiman et al, 2004; Gatta et al, 2016a). Evaluating the couple relationship, starting from the conflicts and distress, can therefore prove to be useful in order to better understand the functioning of the whole family and therefore plan treatments, tailored for the patient as well as for the family needs (Gatta et al, 2009, 2011; Mannarini et al, 2016a). A relationship in which emotions and thoughts are shared within the attachment relationship (Mannarini and Boffo, 2014) with the father as well as with the mother is able to facilitate the development of an adaptive affective regulation and a rich inner emotional life in the offspring (Taylor et al, 1997), thus enhancing the possibility of recovery of the daughter with anorexia nervosa.…”

Adolescents with Mental Disorders: The Efficacy of a Multiprofessional Approach

“…Another fundamental point to emphasize and draw attention to is the parents' cooperation: to establish an adequate therapeutic alliance with the parents appears to be a factor fundamental to a successful clinical course. The parents act as a bridge and give us access to the patient, determining which treatments are acceptable at family level, and the intervention can use them as a vehicle in the sense that a change in their representations of their child and of their role as parents, and a change in the parents' attitudes and mode of interacting with their child are all an important stimulus for mobilizing their child's development (Fava Vizziello et al, 1991;Gatta et al, 2010b). Given the small size of our sample and the psychopathological heterogeneity characterizing our cases, combined with the limited period of follow-up and the paucity of literature on this specific topic, it is still impossible to generalize from our results as concerns the efficacy of this type of treatment.…”

“…This therapeutic method is applicable to various mental disorders, both in developmental age and in adults, and its efficacy has been acknowledged internationally (Bartels et al, 2004;Bond et al, 2001). Within this network, it is also worth emphasizing the importance of the cooperation with the adolescents' families and the proper exploitation of a personal relationship with them so that they can share the experiences of suffering caused by their child's disorder, also with a view to reinforcing the working alliance with them (Gatta et al, 2009b(Gatta et al, , 2010b(Gatta et al, , 2010cHawley & Weisz, 2005;Marcelli, 2009;Woolfenden et al, 2009). …”

“…It is also important to consider that a semi-residential intervention enables adolescents to remain in their habitual living environment and consequently demands a certain degree of cooperation on the part of their parents, or at least for the family environment not to be harmful to the adolescent. It may sometimes be useful to take action on the parents themselves, as emerged from recent research conducted on several patients at our semi-residential service to investigate the influence of direct intervention to modify the parents' perception of their caregiving experience in relation to children with mental disorders (Gatta et al, 2010b): it emerged from our study that paying particular attention, in the course of several meetings, to aspects of the parents' experience and burden can improve their perception of the caregiving experience as well as reinforcing the therapeutic alliance. As in psychotherapy, the alliance can provide a corrective emotional experience sufficient to induce the reprocessing of internalized models relating, in this case, to caregiving.…”