Family Focused Programs

The Department of Psychiatry offers services that integrate family members into treatment. By focusing on the entire family, we can help families to:

• understand the experiences of each family member
• recover from-- and even grow following--acute stress or potentially traumatic experiences
• employ strategies to manage mood symptoms
• increase mutual support
• strengthen couples, parent-child and sibling relationships
• build skills to address future challenges
• learn proactive parenting skills to set their children up for success
• support their children’s social relationships

Our family programs include the following:

• Bedside support for families with a child facing an acute or chronic medical challenge in the hospital
• Trauma-informed therapeutic family evaluation including the impact of potential trauma processes and assessment of family resilience
• Psychodiagnostic assessment to better understand mood symptoms
• Family education and support
• Outpatient therapy to support families following an acute stress or traumatic experience, such as acute pediatric illness, adjustment to parental illness, community disasters, or parental military service
• Parenting groups to strengthen proactive and positive parenting practices
• Outpatient therapy to build positive caregiver-child relationships
• Parent-assisted groups to support children’s social skills