Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Creating options for family recovery: a providers guide for promoting parental mental health

2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/18387357.2015.1066292

1838-7357

Mary V. Seeman,

Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development

Creating options for family recovery: a providers guide for promoting parental mental health, by Joanne Nicholson, Toni Wolf, Chip Wilder and Kathleen Biebel, Marlborough, MA, Employment Options Inc., 2014, 120 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN-10: 0692330801, ISBN-13: 978-0692330807This well-written guidebook for clinicians on the provision of mental health care to families has a very attractive cover, and is even more attractive inside. It is the result of 15 years of work by a Massachusetts, USA, team of researchers, care providers, policy-makers, parents, and family members - the Family Options Project.Dr Joanne Nicholson spearheads this project. She is a clinical and research psychologist and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Dartmouth University who has long been recognized for her many contributions to the mental health community in the area of parenting.Over the course of her career, Dr Nicholson has repeatedly drawn attention to the needs of parents living with mental illness. Approximately one in four adults suffer episodic or continuous psychiatric symptoms. Approximately two-thirds of these adults are also parents. No matter how well-resourced or how cohesive the families of these parents may be, external help will be needed to ensure the healthy development of the children. Unfortunately, many of the families, in addition to psychiatric problems, also live in conditions of poverty, relative isolation, ill health, inadequate housing, and unsafe surroundings. Responsibility for such families is parceled out to child and adult health and social agencies, to welfare and housing, to police and legal authorities. Attempts are made to provide for the individuals in the family but the family as an entity is often not considered and ill parents are not provided with the help they need to adequately provide for their children. Incorporating feedback from parents caught in such circumstances, the Family Options Project has been developing, implementing, and evaluating an effective family-focused intervention (Hinden, Wolf, Biebel, & Nicholson, 2009; Nicholson, Albert, Gershenson, Williams, Biebel, 2009; Nicholson, Biebel, Williams, & Albert, 2008).In a format that stimulates learning, the book explains and illustrates the Family Recovery theoretical model, the Family Options intervention and the steps that need to be taken toward its implementation. The book also shows how parts of the program can be exported to other sites and other circumstances. The main emphasis of the program is on working together with families and learning from them, while at the same time helping them to promote positive communication and positive relationships within the family. …