Because chronic disorder is becoming an ordinary feature of family life and development, understanding its impact has become critical. This volume, and the conference proceedings it reports, represents a major effort to examine the family's response to chronic physical or psychopathological illness in one or more of its members. Recent data are revising our notions of chronic illness. Evidence is mounting that chronic psychiatric disorders reflect, in part, abnormalities of brain structure and function. In this sense, they are, in part, medical disorders. On the other hand, a number of traditionally labeled medical disorders produce a broad range of psychological symptoms and are exquisitely sensitive to psychosocial influences.
Families undergo a complex process of adaptation during which their response to stress and their fundamental beliefs about learning and parenting change. These beliefs endure and are difficult to alter. By examining the processes in a wide range of chronic conditions, this volume helps to identify the common, underlying processes of adaptation. The first three chapters concern the families' responses to disorders that are distinctly medical; the next three focus on families' responses to "grey zone" disorders or anomalies that appear early in life, minor physical anomalies, and communication handicaps; and one chapter focuses exclusively on schizophrenia. The last chapter reflects an effort to develop a model based on the experience of researchers with both psychiatric and medical illness.

One of the most notable findings in contemporary behavior genetics is that children growing up in the same family are not very comparable. Findings suggest that in order to understand individual differences between siblings it is necessary to examine not only the shared experiences but also the differences in experiences of children growing up in the same family. In the past decade a group of investigators has begun to examine the contributions of genetics, and both shared and nonshared environment to development. As with many new research endeavors, this has proven to be a difficult task with much controversy and disagreement not only about the most appropriate models and methods of analysis to be used, but also about the interpretation of findings. Written by some of the foremost scholars working in the area on nonshared environment, the papers in this book present their perspectives, concerns, strategies and research findings dealing with the impact of nonshared environment on individual differences in the development of siblings. This volume will have heuristic value in stimulating researchers to think in new ways about the interactions between heredity, shared and nonshared environment and the challenges in identifying their contributions to sibling differences. These papers should raise new questions about how to examine the contributions of genetic and environmental factors to development, with consideration given to the findings of this study of sibling differences and nonshared environment. Further, these papers may encourage a growing trend to integrate genetic and environmental perspectives in studies of development.

In clinical work, an awareness of patients' subjective experiences, particularly their perceptions of interpersonal relationships, is indispensable. The aim of this book is to improve care and treatment planning by describing a structured approach to eliciting patients' core relationship patterns. These patterns consist of the roles and scenarios into which they repeatedly cast themselves and others with whom they interact. Maladaptive patterns, in which vicious cycles and self-fulfilling prophecies of misperception, misunderstanding or provocation escalate, cause pain and havoc in personal relationships and can adversely affect both professionals' decisions and the overall delivery of treatment. This book shows how to use vital information that is often not made available to treatment teams in order to understand such potential pitfalls rather than succumb to them.

This book is aimed at all practitioners working in healthcare and criminal justice community settings with individuals displaying antisocial, offending, and challenging behaviours, at times complicated by severe mental disorders. Despite risk assessment policies and procedures, we all know how disorientated we can feel when trying to make sense of what is going on in the course of our work. Contributors to this book describe familiar anxiety-provoking situations. Most importantly, they illustrate ideas and perspectives that can help you to rediscover meaning and purpose in your roles and tasks, with the ultimate objective of enabling service-users to manage more effectively the emotional turbulence that invariably lies behind their challenging behaviours.

One of the most notable findings in contemporary behavior genetics is that children growing up in the same family are not very comparable. Findings suggest that in order to understand individual differences between siblings it is necessary to examine not only the shared experiences but also the differences in experiences of children growing up in the same family. In the past decade a group of investigators has begun to examine the contributions of genetics, and both shared and nonshared environment to development. As with many new research endeavors, this has proven to be a difficult task with much controversy and disagreement not only about the most appropriate models and methods of analysis to be used, but also about the interpretation of findings.
Written by some of the foremost scholars working in the area on nonshared environment, the papers in this book present their perspectives, concerns, strategies and research findings dealing with the impact of nonshared environment on individual differences in the development of siblings. This volume will have heuristic value in stimulating researchers to think in new ways about the interactions between heredity, shared and nonshared environment and the challenges in identifying their contributions to sibling differences. These papers should raise new questions about how to examine the contributions of genetic and environmental factors to development, with consideration given to the findings of this study of sibling differences and nonshared environment. Further, these papers may encourage a growing trend to integrate genetic and environmental perspectives in studies of development.

In clinical work, an awareness of patients' subjective experiences, particularly their perceptions of interpersonal relationships, is indispensable. The aim of this book is to improve care and treatment planning by describing a structured approach to eliciting patients' core relationship patterns. These patterns consist of the roles and scenarios into which they repeatedly cast themselves and others with whom they interact. Maladaptive patterns, in which vicious cycles and self-fulfilling prophecies of misperception, misunderstanding or provocation escalate, cause pain and havoc in personal relationships and can adversely affect both professionals' decisions and the overall delivery of treatment. This book shows how to use vital information that is often not made available to treatment teams in order to understand such potential pitfalls rather than succumb to them.

Because chronic disorder is becoming an ordinary feature of family life and development, understanding its impact has become critical. This volume, and the conference proceedings it reports, represents a major effort to examine the family's response to chronic physical or psychopathological illness in one or more of its members. Recent data are revising our notions of chronic illness. Evidence is mounting that chronic psychiatric disorders reflect, in part, abnormalities of brain structure and function. In this sense, they are, in part, medical disorders. On the other hand, a number of traditionally labeled medical disorders produce a broad range of psychological symptoms and are exquisitely sensitive to psychosocial influences. Families undergo a complex process of adaptation during which their response to stress and their fundamental beliefs about learning and parenting change. These beliefs endure and are difficult to alter. By examining the processes in a wide range of chronic conditions, this volume helps to identify the common, underlying processes of adaptation. The first three chapters concern the families' responses to disorders that are distinctly medical; the next three focus on families' responses to "grey zone" disorders or anomalies that appear early in life, minor physical anomalies, and communication handicaps; and one chapter focuses exclusively on schizophrenia. The last chapter reflects an effort to develop a model based on the experience of researchers with both psychiatric and medical illness.

The primary focus of this volume is to support practice by individuals and teams that deal directly either with individuals diagnosed with mental disorder or with those whose presentation causes the same dilemmas for practitioners. The chapters draw on experience gained across a wide spectrum of settings: within the NHS, the National Offender Management Services (NOMS) and the wider criminal justice services, as well as various services for children, young people and their families. The subject matter of this text covers anti social, offending and challenging behaviors: in particular behaviors that create unusual levels of anxiety in practitioners or the public. Valuable insights are offered, with examples, into ways of thinking about these problems and practical guidance is offered on the way professional teams and the individuals within them can develop and maintain effective work. While not explicitly focused on those identified as having a personality disorder, the material concerns individuals with psychological difficulties that are pervasive, enduring and which have a particularly intrusive impact on caring staff members working with them.

The popular image of alcoholism is one of families devastated by violence and torn by dramatic conflict. The authors of this book paint a very different picture, offering powerful evidence that most chronic alcoholics live out their lives in intact, relatively quiet family environments. However, they show that living in an alcoholic family - one in which alcoholism is the central theme around which family life is organized - has profound effects on family members, both drinkers and nondrinkers, and that these effects can be carried from generation to generation in complex ways.

"The Relationship Code" is the report of a longitudinal study, conducted over a ten-year period, of the influence of family relationships and genetic factors on competence and psychopathology in adolescent development. The sample for this landmark study included 720 pairs of same-sex adolescent siblings--including twins, half siblings, and genetically unrelated siblings--and their parents.

Using a clear expressive style, David Reiss and his coinvestigators identify specific mechanisms that link genetic factors and the social environment in psychological development. They propose a striking hypothesis: family relationships are crucial to the expression of genetic influences on a broad array of complex behaviors in adolescents. Moreover, this role of family relationships may be very specific: some genetic factors are linked to mother-child relationships, others to father-child relations, some to relationship warmth, while others are linked to relationship conflict or control. The specificity of these links suggests that family relationships may constitute a code for translating genetic influences into the ontogeny of behaviors, a code every bit as important for behavior as DNA-RNA.

David Reiss presents a new model of family interaction grounded in the subtle and complex way in which a family constructs its inner life and deals with the outside world. Based upon fifteen years of research, the book offers a new understanding of the covert processes that hold a family together and, with distressing frequency, pull it apart.