Family Narratives and Systemic Insights - 3 x 30 minute sessions- Remembering Rachel a sisters perspective - Deborah Kasdan
- Family Fragments: Pressure and Proximity in First-Episode Psychosis - Cassandra B. Seltman, LCSW, PhD
- Straight From The Cuckoo's Nest: A Patient's & A Caregiver's Perspective - Perri Bach, BS, Ethan Back, AS
Remembering Rachel a sisters perspective - Deborah Kasdan
A personal account of the impact of the impact of failed psychiatric treatment on my sister Rachel, myself and our entire family of six, as recounted in my book, "Roll Back the World: a sister's memoir."
Rachel was healthy and vibrant during her gap year working on a kibbutz in Israel but when she returned to the U.S. her behavior was erratic and disorganized. She was unable to care for herself and our parents were unable to care for her. In 1965 at 23 years of age, Rachel was institutionalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia; I was just starting college and was unable to process what was happening to her. My brother started college the next year. We had no family meetings or therapy to help and support us. Our parents wanted to keep Rachel safe, but we wanted her to be free. Our parents filed a Federal law suit to keep her in the hospital because she was assaulted and raped in boarding houses where she was discharged. Her siblings' attempt to free her from the hospital backfired and Rachel ended up on her own two thousand miles from home. She lived on the streets and in three state hospitals for years until a social worker was stunned by the quality of her poetry and got her into an outpatient program. Eventually, the staff found an ideal home for her and she found acceptance and respect in a synagogue. I explore my own feelings of shame and guilt, my inability to help her as I wished to, or share these feelings --until finally, in publishing the memoir about us, I brought them to light. This personal history suggests the need to include adult siblings in decision-making and help families deal with the host of conflicts that arise around hospitalization and treatment of a loved one.
Family Fragments: Pressure and Proximity in First-Episode Psychosis - Cassandra B. Seltman, LCSW, PhDThis presentation will explore the value of assuming a conceptual position that decenters the identified patient in families with a member with schizophrenia. Instead, a systemic view of the family is taken, as subject to pressures from without and within, and utilizing observable processes for the management and discharge of tension. It attempts the difficult balance of thinking dynamically without sacrificing scientific rigor, considering the social without discounting the biological, and exploring the functionality of the family without collapsing into blame, reductive cause-and-effect thinking, and the search to prioritize one true origin. When treating family members as discrete units around an identified patient, information about the dynamic processes at work in the family system is lost. Core concepts of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory (developed primarily from the 1950s through the late 1980s) will be utilized to study the interaction between family dynamics and the prodrome and first-episode of psychosis. Under these considerations, the goal of treatment is not to suppress or destroy a single pathogenic element, but to make adjustments to the distribution and discharge of tension in the context of the emotional family system, requiring and inciting modifications in all relations. Ultimately, the complexity of family systems research beckons us to move beyond the current pessimistic paradigm of family treatments as opportunities for families to assist the individual at the center of concern with coping skills and medication compliance. In addition, it requires further engagement with the intricate correspondence of individual, familial, and societal entanglements which most often occur below the level of conscious awareness. In its wake lies the imperative for an integrated approach and echoes the clarion call for interventions that consider the many fractal dimensions of the experience of being part of a family.
Straight From The Cuckoo's Nest: A Patient's & A Caregiver's Perspective - Perri Bach, BS, Ethan Back, ASEthan has written a memoir of his experiences suffering 5 psychotic breaks after a brain tumor at 17 years old and will read an excerpt from his memoir. The excerpt will be from the introduction and a little of a chapter. Before showing a video, he will end with how he got better, by trusting his Drs, taking his medications, and becoming sober. He will show a video on YouTube with Ian Gold in it, who wrote the forward to Ethan’s book, and who also coined the term “The Truman Show Delusion” in his own book he co-authored with his brother called “Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness”. The TSD is a staple of Ethan’s illness. Last, Perri will offer a caretaker’s perspective, offering what one should do if this happened to your family member or friend: the message will be to not give up on them. She will offer her own educated opinion on what the US could do to better the fates of those suffering from like illnesses on the streets. This presentation will offer hope to those suffering out there, as Ethan is Sober off alcohol and smoking weed and hasn’t had a break since spring 2020, 4 years ago. Then the floor will open for questions/comments.
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