Over 50 million Americans have a mental illness, but as many as 20 million don't have their illness detected. And many others get substandard treatment. Family members play a crucial role in recognizing mental illness, and helping a loved one get the treatment they need. The early signs of mental illness are clear if you know what to look for, and getting rapid and effective treatment will help your relative get better faster. If you think a family member or friend may be struggling with a mental illness, or isn't getting effective treatment, this guide will help you recognize symptoms, get the right treatment, and work together as a family to help your loved one get better. Inside you'll find step-by-step support and information for determining whether someone you care about is suffering from a mental disorder, and what you can do to help. The Family Intervention Guide to Mental Illness outlines the nine fundamental steps to recognizing, managing, and recovering from mental illness. It provides both diagnostic information and details about therapy options and useful medications. With the right advice, determined effort, and a lot of love, you can make a difference.

The book is a compendium of articles from Psychiatric Services and Hospital and Community Psychiatry on family and mental health treatment.

At the time of this writing, there is much uncertainty about the form of this country's future healthcare system and the role of psychiatry and other mental health disciplines in that system. Current experience with various managed healthcare programs is not encouraging. Most often patients with severe psychiatrie disturbances receive, at best, so me form of crisis intervention or brief treatment. Marital and family approaches to treatment receive even less support. This discouraging socioeconomic context makes the work of John Schwab and his colleagues even more important than it would be in more favorable times. Their message is clear: The family is crucial to an understanding of psychiatrie disorders and must often be the major focus in the treatment of these disorders. This book is unique in its direct reflection of the senior author's long-term professional interests-the family, epidemiology, and history. A careful reading provides family therapists and researchers with won derful opportunities to examine the ways in which history, socio economie and politieal contexts, and epidemiology can be used to in crease understanding of the family. This his tory of the family is unusually thorough; in particular, I found fascinating the information about early Egyptian families (3000 B.C.) and their accordance of high status of women.

Of all mental health disorders, schizophrenia remains the most pervasive, bewildering, and resistant to treatment. In addition to its profound effect on the patient, the illness can be equally devastating to the family, a problem that is compounded by the family's frequent role as provider of primary care. Psychoeducation systematically takes into account the family's role in providing care, and the importance of supporting this system, which in turn supports the patient. It is a method of care that remains focused on the family while making use of biological, psychological, and vocational interventions. SCHIZOPHRENIA IN THE FAMILY represents the first treatment manual based on the psychoeducational model. In conjunction with maintenance chemotherapy, psychoeducation reduces the emotional intensity of the patient's environment and creates a sense of continuous care. Using illustrative case examples, this "how-to-do-it' manual demonstrates methods to: * Increase treatment compliance * Sustain patients in the community * Gradually integrate patients into familial, social, and vocational roles. Specifically, they explain how to develop a productive treatment alliance with the patient and the family, and how to share with them concrete knowledge about the illness as well as management techniques for handling its difficulties. They provide recommendations for managing the critical, early outpatient phase of treatment and suggest methods for promoting the ability to work and socialize outside the home. Additionally, they describe how to conduct the final stages of treatment, when patients may be moving into maintenance sessions, other treatment methods, or toward termination. The book concludes with a helpful chapter on training issues and the application of the psychoeducational model to other mental health systems.

Research has shown that interventions providing psychoeducation and assistance to family members significantly reduce hospitalizations for people with serious mental illness, and help families cope. But research-based models have not been implemented in most mental health systems. This volume looks at the political and socioeconomic realities involved, and describes ways innovative family services have been provided, despite those factors, in many countries throughout the world. Written by some of the world's leading researchers on psychoeducation, the text also includes material on the rise of family advocacy organizations worldwide. Professionals looking for innovative, culturally appropriate ways to help families and patients cope with mental illness will be most interested.

Mental health practitioners often think about the person seeking help as the first priority; and the context in which they live may become a secondary consideration. However, there is now good evidence that working with families can be very helpful, both for family members and for the person experiencing mental health issues. For instance, offering family intervention for people with psychosis can in some cases reduce the relapse rate. Working with the whole family can also help reduce the burden placed on carers – for example, in families of people with dementia. Written by a team of experts in the field, this book gives useful, practical guidance on a range of ways in which mental health practitioners can work with children, adults and families who access mental health services. Where possible, hypothetical examples are used to show how a particular theory or model can be applied in practice. The authors have also drawn on interventions and approaches where there is an established evidence base, showing how collaborative approaches can be adapted to meet the particular needs of individual families.

Advice on Helping Your Loved Ones, from the medical director of the country's largest state mental health system and the mental health editor of The Huffington Post More than fifty million people a year are diagnosed with some form of mental illness. It spares no sex, race, age, ethnicity, or income level. And left untreated, mental disorders can devastate our families and communities. Family members and friends are often the first to realize when someone has a problem, but it is hard to know how to help or where to turn. Our mental health “system” can feel like a bewildering and frustrating maze. How can you tell that someone has a mental illness? What are the first and best steps for you to take? Where do you go to find the right care? The Family Guide to Mental Health Care is the first comprehensive print resource for the millions of people who have loved ones suffering from some kind of mental illness. In this book, families can find the answers to their most urgent questions. What medications are helpful and are some as dangerous as I think? Is there a way to navigate privacy laws so I can discuss my adult daughter’s treatment with her doctor? Is my teenager experiencing typical adolescent distress or an illness? From understanding depression, bipolar illness and anxiety to eating and traumatic disorders, schizophrenia, and much more, readers will learn what to do and how to help. Real-life scenarios and authoritative information are written in a compassionate, reader-friendly way, including checklists to bring to a doctor’s appointment so you can ask the right questions. For readers who fear they will never see the light at the end of the tunnel, this book gives hope and a path forward. As one of the nation’s leading voices on quality care in mental health, Dr. Lloyd Sederer has played a singular role in advancing services for those with mental illness. Now, the wealth of his expertise and clear guidance is at your disposal. From the first signs of a problem to sorting through the variety of treatment options, you and your family will be able to walk into a doctor’s office know what to do and what to ask.

In this age of spiraling health care costs, it is imperative that the family's role in treating patients with chronic mental illness not be overlooked - by policy makers and clinicians alike. The families themselves insist that the government and care-providing agencies learn new ways to relate to them and patients. Helping Families Cope with Mental Illness is a comprehensive guide to the family's experience of chronic and serious mental illness for clinicians and educators in a wide range of mental health disciplines. It details all major areas of the clinician-family relationship - consumer perspectives, cultural diversity, social policy, ethical issues, practical coping strategies, research and training issues, major service issues, managed care, and cost-saving measures.

Endorsement from Benedict Carey, science reporter, The New York Times: "Across my career covering mental health, I have fielded scores of urgent calls from readers: 'My brother's suicidal;' or, 'my daughter is on the street, psychotic' -what do I do? There was never one good answer. But now there is: a warmly written, deeply informed guide for families in crisis, by true experts with a lifetime of experience." About the book A Family Guide to Mental Health Recovery is for parents of adult children who struggle with a serious mental illness. Serious mental illness is complex, the mental health treatment system in the U.S. is fragmented, and you may often feel like your child's future has been overlooked. We want you to know there is hope for recovery. This guide is intended to help families get their bearings, understand the mental health system and its limitations, and build a path forward towards person-centered recovery. Additional Endorsements "This is a 'break the glass' kind of document to help you know how to respond to an emergency." "When you have just gotten the diagnosis, you think, "What the heck should we do?" This guide would have given us a new way of thinking about what was going on and what to do next. And it would have helped us in a crisis to know about all of the options." "I like how you have helped us to see that there is no single path to recovery. It would be good to repeat that there is no tried and true method for everyone. Each person is different." "Your treatment planning section shows that having a diagnosis does not mean that my family member should forget about her dreams of having a good life. The overall theme is that there is hope; there are things that are useful to try."