Learn how social factors promote mental health, influence the onset and course of mental illness, and affect how mental illnesses are diagnosed and treated. This course explores how our understanding of mental health and illness has been influenced by social attitudes and social developments in North America and around the world. The course begins by situating our contemporary mental health practices in historical context, then looks at different aspects of mental health, mental illness and mental health services and their connections to what’s going on in our social environment.
5.4 families and recovery
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From the course by University of Toronto
The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness
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From the lesson
Families, caregiving and mental illness
Meet the Instructors
Charmaine WilliamsAssociate Professor
Faculty of Social Work
Our last segment is about families in recovery.
We've talked about recovery as something that we hope for, when we're talking about
individuals who are diagnosed with mental illness, but families also have their own
recovery process, they go through a very similar journey.
Before I get into the rest of this, I'm going to ask you to watch this excerpt
from the Family Guide to Mental Health Recovery.
So let's talk about ways forward for families.
As that segment just demonstrated, I think that what can make it so difficult for
families is the isolation that we've already talked about, and the stigma
that's associated with having a relative that has a diagnosis of mental illness.
So how do we support families so that they can be the best supports possible for
their diagnosed family members, and also promote their own mental health.
Well some of the things that we already have in place, are things like
psychoeducation, an other types of family therapy that are available.
Often an important part of psychoeducation, is actually bringing
families together, who are going through similar experiences.
And as the person said in that last segment, it makes a big difference to know
that there are other people who have experienced the same thing, have dealt
with the same things, and frankly have survived and maybe even thrived under the
same conditions. And so, psychoeducation and social support
are incredibly important, for helping people deal with family burden.
There's another level too that we need to think about, in terms of what we as a
society do to support families who are dealing with mental illness.
But that's something that we'll probably talk about more in the next segment, when
we're talking about societies communities and promoting mental health.
For now what I'd like to say, is I do think that burden is something that we
should be able to think about being able to prevent.
That's not to say that, that families who have someone diagnosed with a mental
illness aren't going to experience stress. The nature of having somebody that you
love dealing with an illness, is that it's going to be stressful, and that's
certainly stressful for the person who's dealing with the illness themselves.
But the burden, the piece of it that has to do with the strain and the feeling of
being unsupported, and the distress, I think these are things that maybe can be
prevented. And some of that has to do with things
that families can do, but a lot of it has to do with things that the rest of us of
us can do. Part of this is also about stigma, stigma
needs to be recognized as a specific stressor for family members.
We often don't think about how the general stigma against mental illness affects
family members, and also how there is a very specific type of stigma that family
members have to deal with themselves. This is certainly something that families
need to be able to talk about, it needs to be something that we can help people cope
with. But as members of the community and as
people who are connected to families that are dealing with this, we also have to be
able to help destigmatize that experience, and that often can be as just as simple as
even asking how their doing and how their relative is doing.
Thinking more generally about family mental health in the context of mental
illness, I'm just going to briefly reiterate some of the things you've
already heard from the segments in the family guide to mental health recovery.
Certainly it's very important that all members of the family prioritize their own
well-being and their own mental health, nobody can be a good care giver if they're
not taking care of themselves. And it's very important to invest in your
own mental health and stability, so that when there are periods of instability and
stress you're better able to withstand them.
So, again, some of that has to do with what families do for themselves, but it
also has to do with the people around them and how we support families who are
dealing with this. That speaks to the main importance of
having meaningful interpersonal relationships within the family and
outside the family. We want to keep, healthy and supportive
relationships within families, but families also need to have those kinds of
relationships with people who are outside the family unit.
And then as a final thought, you know one of the things that we're starting to see
in the caregiving literature, is that people are talking about the positives of
being in a caregiving relationship. For so long we focused on the burden, and
I think that was really because we wanted to be able to, create an evidence based,
that will allow us support family members who, who needed it so much.
But, we also want to remember that, these are often relationships that are built on
love. And that, as some have already suggested,
care giving is an honorable role, it's a valued role, and it's a role that people
take on because of their concern and love for other people and their families.
So, we want to be able to help families experience, the positives of caregiving.
And certainly, one of the things that people have said makes that more possible,
is if we are also able to see the positives in caregivers themselves.
So from there we're going to go into our conclusion.
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