FAMILY & EMPOWERMENT

Update : 2023-07-23 18:42:55
Family : its role in the empowerment of the patientof patient.

The involvement of families in the treatment of patients with mental disorder is critical in terms of rehabilitation outcomes and decrease of family’s stress. Achieving this involvement, however, has been shown to be difficult and discouraging for many therapists. That is why sharing new knowledge and practices on this important issue is a crucial matter on this field.
Our project created a network to share and discuss these issues.

Moreover, the Spanish coordinator partner has an outstanding qualification on a new strategy called Multifamily Group Therapy, in short MGT. This technique was learned and shared with other countries (France, Iceland and Belgium). On this regard, it has been found out that holding therapy sessions with different families at the same time enlarges the therapeutic outcomes in the treatment of different psychiatric pathologies compared to other types of therapy and specially for disorders that require a greater social contention. This technique helps, on one side, to avoid burn-out between professionals, who will not feel isolated in their responsibility towards the treatment, and , on the other side, it helps to decrease economic costs since many patients can be attended at the same time. As a consequence it is expected to improve not only symptomatic items of the patient but also to reduce the duration of the hospitalization of patients and to avoid patient relapse.

Consequently, this project had 2 main objectives:

• To create a network to share knowledge on the involvement of family in therapy;
• To train people on Multifamily Group Therapy, making this psychotherapy strategy available to different professional teams across Europe.