How can a supportive family help improve their child's mental health?
Male Speaker: Probably enough, we tend to do in psychiatry historically is if anything we blame the family for the problem instead of asking the family for assistance.
Now you see, for instance, the treatment of anorexia nervosa, what we use this the maudsely approach which is empowering the family to make a difference. Huge effects, it's actually one of our best evidence-based interventions for anorexia nervosa in young people.
The treatment of schizophrenia, another great example were family psychoeducation has a very large impact on long-term improvement and long-term ability of people with schizophrenia to be able to go back to work and to be able to recover.
It's fascinating to realize that in other countries this comes as no surprise. There is something about the American system that has tended to isolate people from their families whether it's historically in the asylum system, recently in a system in which adults particularly with mental illness are kept away from everybody else, even for part of their treatment or as part of the way in which they are incorporated into an dysfunctional part of society.
If you look at the way that schizophrenia is treated in India, it's very different. In India when someone develops schizophrenia, that's the call to arms to bring the family in and it's the family that does most of the treatment and most of the social support.
Interestingly, the little bit we know about outcomes they looks pretty good. So there is a lesson to be had there, not just the risk to family members when mental illness is untreated, but the importance of bringing family into the process to ensure that everybody does better.
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