Substance Abuse Treatment and Family Therapy. A Treatment Improvement Protocols TIP 39

摘要

Family therapy has a long and solid history within the broad mental health field. Substance abuse treatment, on the other hand, developed in considerable isolation. Indeed, until the 1970s, alcoholism counselors typically outright rejected the predominant view of mental health practitioners that alcohol abuse was a symptom of some underlying disorder rather than a primary disorder on its own account. Nonetheless, the importance of the family was clear to substance abuse professionals, and substance abuse programs included activities for family members. In this TIP, these types of participation by family members in standard treatment programs are referred to as family-involved treatment or techniques. This distinction separates the typically marginal involvement of families in substance abuse treatment programs from the types of family therapy regularly found in the family therapy field. Within the family therapy tradition, the family as a whole is the focus of treatment. Although focusing on the family as a whole has been the mainstay of the family therapy field, such a focus often resulted in inadequate attention to the significant primary features of addictive disease and the need for people with substance abuse problems to receive direct help for their addiction. Slowly, over the past 20 years or so, sharing has increased between the substance abuse treatment and family therapy fields. The expert practitioners from both fields who served as consensus panel members for this TIP recognize that much greater cross-fertilization, if not integration, is possible and warranted. This TIP represents advice on how both fields can profit from understanding and incorporating the methods and theories of the other field. The primary audience for this TIP is substance abuse treatment counselors; family therapists are a secondary audience. The TIP should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about family therapy. The intent of the TIP is to help counselors and family therapists acquire a basic understanding of each others fields and incorporate aspects of each others work into their own therapeutic repertoire.