The Family in Health and Illness: Some Neglected Areas

That the family is of crucial importance in in dividual health and illness is an age-old truism with many neglected implications. Much of the literature pertaining to the family and illness is so little concerned with families qua families as to suggest a nonfamily orientation, an afamily bias. For example, the several hundred studies of child-rearing patterns and parent-child relationships as causal factors in mental illness largely ignore the family unit by excluding the patient's siblings, the mother's relationships with her well children, and the impact of the ill child upon the total family. The current trend of moving the treatment setting back into the family and community is contrary to the thesis that the modern family is unable to perform sick-care functions for its members but is consonant with the existence of a modified extended family which family specialists have largely ignored. Thus, it is encouraging that an increasing number of educators and researchers are emphasizing the total f amily—nuclear and extended—in relation to health and illness; the emphasis is long overdue. The question remains as to whether the recent and growing interest in the reciprocal influences of illness and the total family will develop with sufficient speed and soundness to provide policy guidance and a firm basis for evaluation and re-evaluation of current developments in the public-health and mental-health fields.