Helping Couples and Families Navigate Illness and Disability: An Integrated Approach

Couples and families face daunting challenges as they cope with serious illness and disability. This book gives clinicians a roadmap for helping affected individuals and their loved ones live well with a wide range of child, adult, and later-life conditions. John S. Rolland describes ways to intervene with emerging challenges over the course of long-term or life-threatening disorders. Using vivid case examples, he illustrates how clinicians can help families harness their strengths for positive adaptation and relational growth. Rolland's integrative systemic approach is useful for preventive screening, consultations, brief counseling, more intensive therapy, and multifamily groups, across health care settings and disciplines.

This book significantly advances the clinical utility of Rolland's earlier landmark volume, Families, Illness, and Disability and is useful for couple and family therapists and counselors, clinical psychologists, social workers, pastoral counselors, nurses, and psychiatrists. It may serve as a primary or supplemental text for courses on families and health within family therapy, social work, psychology, and nursing programs.

Table of Contents

I. The Family Systems Illness Model: The Experience of Illness and Disability

1. A Family Psychosocial Map with Chronic Conditions
2. The Psychosocial Typology of Illness
3. The Time Phases of Illness

II. The FSI Model: Working with Couples and Families

4. An Integrative Practice Approach with Couples and Families
5. Facilitating Family Organizational and Communication Processes
6. Understanding Multigenerational Experiences
7. Addressing Life-Cycle Issues with Chronic Conditions
8. Tapping the Power of Family Belief Systems

III. Phase-Related Issues and Specific Populations: Practice Guidelines

9. Helping Families with Anticipatory Loss and Suffering
10. Helping Families in the Terminal Phase
11. Chronic Conditions in Childhood and Adolescence
12. Parental Illness and Later Life Challenges
13. Intimacy Issues for Couples
14. Rebalancing the Couple’s Relationship
15. Individual and Family Challenges in the New Era of Genetics
16. Neurocognitive Impairment: Mastering Challenges over Time

IV. The Clinician’s Experience and Collaborative Practice

17. Personal Themes for Clinicians: The Shared Experience of Illness
18. Collaborative Health Care: Linking Families with Systems of Care

References

Index

""Rolland takes readers on a compelling journey into the lives of couples and families coping with serious and chronic illness. He grounds his work in the empirical literature and in his extensive clinical experience. I recommend this book for clinical graduate school programs and medical residencies.""
- Cleveland G. Shield, PhD, Dept of Human Development & Family Studies & Purdue Center for Cancer Research, Purdue University

""This book is a treasure. Rolland has put a career's worth of insight, wisdom, craft, and humanity into every chapter. All clinicians who work with couples and families will benefit immensely from reading this important, up-to-date work.""
- William J. Doherty, PhD, Department of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota