A three-year follow-up of family therapy

A 3-year follow-up of a family therapy focusing on adolescents was done. Twenty-four of 28 families were contacted by telephone interviews with the mothers. Nine variables were assessed with a trend shown toward the deterioration of previously superior effects of short-term family therapy with 57% of the family therapy group identified patients versus 20% of the individual therapy group identified patients having been rehospitalized by the end of the 3 years since the original (3 month) follow-up. Thus, the longer-term finding suggests a superior effect of individual therapy over family therapy, although this conclusion must be provisional in the light of limitations in the research method used and/or chance factors.Our interest in this brief report is to call attention to the critical nature of the time factor in follow-up studies, as most of those currently available have been limited to follow-up periods of one year or less.