Family Mental Health

Mental illness is a hard process, not just for the person, but the family as well. We don’t want to see anyone we know and love go through these type of things. Having been able to see a family member that suffers from a mental illness, it is a sad sight. It literally eats them alive, to the point where they cannot see their value anymore. We tend to put our personal feelings before their well-being, but not in a selfish way, it is a way where we don’t want to

Many people have many different definitions of a family. Some include family as the people they live with, some include their entire extended family, and some include friends, neighbors, coaches, and teachers. According to the Vanier Institute (2013), a family is “a combination of two or more persons who are bound together over time by ties of mutual consent, birth, and/or adoption” (para. 2). Whichever way you look at it, families often play a major role in life. It only makes sense that when a person begins to go through a drastic change in life such as illness, the family will be involved. This is why it is important that nurses learn how to provide suitable client and family centered care. They can do this by following the four

Nordby,K. Kjonsberg, K. Hummelvoll, J.K.(2009) Relatives of persons with recently discovered serious mental illness: in need of support to become resource persons in treatment and recovery.(Appendix 1). Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing. 17, 304-311.

Making it difficult for patients to receive adequate health care for their psychological issues. From a nursing standpoint, this book was interesting and informative. It demonstrated that the legal and psychological health care systems need to be fixed. At the end of the story, Pete concluded that mental illness is a disease that his son must endure for the rest of his life. However, he will be there to help his son, and will never abandon Mike (Earley page 361).

The health of a family is a vital part of how that family interacts with one another and how each individual of the family will function in society, later teaching their children about a healthy lifestyle or lack thereof. The family health assessment helps to identify risk factors and potential dysfunction (Edelman, 2014) I interviewed a single parent family home about their health and how they perceive it. This family is an all-male family, an athletic seventeen year old boy getting ready for his senior year, a twenty year old young man, and a hardworking, dedicated, overweight father.

The final article I analyzed was titled “Aging Parents of Adults with Serious Mental Illness” and was written by Jennifer Van Pelt. This article sought to address the type of support parents caring for special needs adult children require as they age. It discussed how parents are the primary caregivers to children with a severe mental illness, or SMI, throughout the majority of the child’s life. The amount of care provided to adults with SMI by their aging parents is so substantial that if parental caregivers stopped providing care, public programs could never handle it. The author of this article wanted to put more focus on assisting the aging caregiver population, increase their emotional well-being, and lower their stress burden through the use of a social work home-based intervention program. In the pilot study, families received instruction on problem-solving techniques, education about the adult child’s particular mental illness, and sessions that included cognitive therapy, stress management, behavioral management, and future planning. This initial study yielded promising results, including greater life satisfaction and less emotional stress reported by aging parents. The author concludes the article by discussing the importance of planning for the future and how the adult child with SMI will be taken care of after the parents’ deaths.

The mental health professional I interviewed was Carol McClelland of Freedom House Recovery Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Carol has worked with Freedom House for a year as the directory of outpatient services and is licensed as a LPC, LPCS, LCAS, CCS, and MA. Carol’s job requires her to be responsible for the direct oversight of all clinical operations and clinical integrity for outpatient services at Freedom House. The hours of operation are Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm, along with a crisis and detox center that is available for contact 24/7. Carol has plenty of experience in the mental health field, such as working as a dual diagnosis/substance abuse outpatient therapist, working with the severely mentally ill, working as a criminal justice outpatient therapist, and also working in a methadone clinic. She chose this career after her experiences in working with mental health, and her extensive education in psychology and counseling. Carol stated that outpatient services was the most interesting out of her job experiences, so when she was offered the job at Freedom House, she accepted.

Family therapy is a form of psychotherapy employed to assist members of a family in improving communication systems, conflict resolution, and to help the family to deal with certain problems that manifest in the behavior of members. In most cases, deviance in a family member is an indication of underlying family dysfunctions. This paper looks the counselling procedure that can be applied to help the Kline family solve their problems. It answers certain questions including those of the expected challenges during therapy and ways of dealing with the challenges.

A comprehensive family assessment provides a foundation to promote family health (Edelman & Mandle, 2011). 1987 Marjorie Gordon purposed 11 functional health patterns to use for guidance in order to facilitate nurses to have a frame work for the family assessment in. Gordon’s 11 functional health patterns help organizes basic family assessment information. This standardized format will guide nurses to complete the family assessment using system approaches, which will identify a patient’s

As the society we live in continues to transform, nurses need a comprehensive tool to assess family’s health patterns. Family units are influenced by environment, biological, mental, social and spiritual factors. Assessing these areas for health promotion and disease prevention will take all of these influences into consideration (Edelman & Mandle, 2010). A priority to a family focused health assessment approach is to adequately question, assess and examine these areas. A tool to assist a family health assessment using a family focused approach is Gordon’s 11 Functional Patterns. This paper will use these 11

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate one family's experience of living with multiple chronic illnesses into the Calgary Family Assessment Model (CFAM) and Rolland's Chronic Health Challenge Framework. CFAM was developed by Dr. Lorraine M. Wright, a professor Emeritus of nursing and by Dr. Maureen Leahey, a manager of a mental health outpatient program both have over 25 years experience while still managing to supervise, teach, consult, write, and maintain a part-time clinical practice in individual, couple, and family therapy (Moxie, 2007). CFAM allows nurses to assess families during interviews. CFAM is a multidimensional framework consisting of three major categories: structural, dimensional and functional. (Wright & Leahey, 2005)

A family consists of a group of interacting individuals related by blood, marriage, cohabitation, or adoption who interdependently perform relevant functions by fulfilling expected roles. (Edelman, Kudzma, & Mandle, 2014, p. 150)

Families are often the main support system for people affected by mental illness. If a

Using Gordon’s functional health patterns to assess a family will guide the nurse in developing a comprehensive nursing assessment that is holistic in nature. Gordon’s functional health patterns are founded on 11 principles that are incorporated within the nursing practice. These 11 principles serve as a framework for a thorough nursing assessment in which to build a holistic and individual family care plan (Grand Canyon University, 2011). The author has developed family-focused questions for each of the 11 principles and utilized these questions as a tool to assess her own family. This paper will summarize the family assessment that was performed by the author and discuss two wellness nursing diagnoses that

Goal: To analyse the mechanism of FHS multidisciplinary team`s action on patients with mental disorders and their families. Method: integrative literature review with five methodological steps. This study reviewed articles written in both English and Portuguese, but it excluded non-free or unrelated articles. These articles were selected from the following databases: LILACS, MedLine and SCiElO. Results: 10 out of 39 articles were selected and organized by author, title, magazine, year of publication and evidence. Conclusion: FHS team is unprepared to offer minimal levels of information to patients with mental disorder and their families. This multidisciplinary team must make