MFT Solutions: Healing Relationships

Solution-Focused Couple, Family and Individual Therapy

Welcome to Family Therapy and Mental Health!

So, here are the slides for Friday. Please, if you can, download these, print them for yourself, and bring them with you.

Day One - Introduction to the Course

Download the slides in Powerpoint format

Download the slides as a pdf handout

Day Two - Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

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Additional Reading for Day Two

Note that your Carlson and Sperry text has an excellent chapter on Bipolar Disorder (Chapter 2) that you could read. In your spare time....

Want to check out some movies related to this week's topics?

Look at scenes from A Beautiful Mind

Meet Mr. Jones

Check out Benny and Joon

Day Three - Personality Disorders

Download the slides in Powerpoint format

Download the slides as a pdf handout

There are too many movies to mention. Bring popcorn.

And we have a special guest. I'm bringing a psychiatrist for Show and Tell.

Day Four - Anxiety

Download the slides in Powerpoint format

Download the slides as a pdf handout

Day Five - Depression, Eating Disorders, and Exam

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Thank you so much for being a part of this course!

Oh, and you're not done yet. Don't forget that your final papers are due in three weeks, on November 26th. Email them to me please, or call me if you need to make other arrangements.

This page is updated whenever I am actively teaching a course at the University of Guelph. You will find links for slide downloads on this page posted at noon on Wednesday before class.

If you ever forget or cannot find the link to this page go to my home page and check at the bottom of the page for a new or updated link.

I'm teaching Family Therapy and Mental Health this fall so will be updating this website continuously. Check back here often and refresh your browser to see the changes.

Marriage and family therapy (MFT) developed in opposition to, and in order to improve upon, mainstream psychotherapy. Whereas mainstream psychotherapy said that problems resided in individuals and that treatment had to be focused on individuals, there were frequently treatment failures when individuals returned to their families. MFT emphasized the importance of interaction between individuals as the source of illness and made the relationship the target of treatment. MFT expanded mainstream psychotherapy and made it more effective.

But individuals still have problems. A person may have a biological predisposition to a particular psychological problem, may interact in a particular social milieu that makes them susceptible to the expression of that problem, and finally may be overwhelmed by stress in such a way that the individual falls ill. Examples include depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, and personality disorders.

The purpose of this course is, in a sense, to come full circle and to (re)introduce marriage and family therapists to individual psychopathology.

Some marriage and family therapists find this course to be challenging because of MFT's having differentiated itself from medical psychiatry and diagnosis. But in the twenty-first century, MFT is being reintegrated into mainstream psychotherapy. In the U.S., MFTs perform diagnoses (if they want to get paid) yet maintain their focus on the treatment of the relationship.

Even if you don't know your field's history, you may find this course challenging because of its tendency to (re)locate the symptom in the individual, instead of the relationship. For example, how do you do couples therapy when one partner is diagnosed with bipolar disorder? You may spend a lot of time educating the non-diagnosed partner (NDP) about the illness in the diagnosed parter (DP) and coaching the NDP to be more understanding and tolerant of the DP, as well as vigilant for changes in the DP's condition so as to get them early treatment when they become unstable. You can't do much therapy with the DP except when they are well. Does this sound like normal couples therapy to you?

Others may welcome this course precisely because it is more mainstream and medical.

The purpose of this course is also to explore the relationship between individual psychopathology and relationships. It centres on the DSM-IV, the current standard for diagnosis of mental disorders.

Want a complete list of DSM-IV codes? Click here

Want to see where diagnosis will be heading in 2013? Check out the DSM-V

Want to register for the course? Go here.

Want to have fun and prepare for the course at the same time? Watch The Time Traveler's Wife. We'll be talking about this movie as a metaphor for mental illness in families, on the first day.

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