Family and Couple Therapy

Family therapy is psychotherapy that directly involves family members in addition to the identified patient and/or explicitly attends to the interactions among family members. Family therapy engages relational and communicational processes of families and social networks as a primary context for solving clinical problems or treating psychiatric disorders, even though one family member may be the sole bearer of distress or symptoms. Couple therapy is akin to family therapy but is distinguished by its focus upon intimate emotional and sexual aspects of a dyadic relationship. Levels of intervention can range from family psychoeducation to family-centered psychiatric treatment to formal family therapy, thus providing psychiatrists with a scope of interventions, each of which utilizes the couple or family as unit of treatment. Worldwide, family identity often takes priority over individual identity. Consequently, family-centered therapies are often more fitting for non-Western cultures than the individual psychotherapies. The centrality of the family as primary social unit and locus of relational resources is assuming increasing importance for global mental health programs in low-and middle-income countries, in settings of armed conflict, and with refugees displaced from their homes.