Schizophrenia and the Family: II. Adverse Effects of Family Therapy

Theoretical formulations of the past thirty years have championed the hypothesis that family interaction contributes heavily to the etiology of schizophrenia, a position that has dominated contemporary family therapy even in the absence of solid empirical confirmation. The possibility that sociogenic modeling of schizophrenia is not only incorrect but even harmful to families, and to the relationship between families and clinicians, has never been taken seriously, despite its implications for the practice of family therapy. The author describes untoward effects of the sociogenic hypothesis in his own ten-year experience with families of chronic schizophrenics and examines pertinent reports in the family therapy literature, offering the reinterpretation that many communicational aberrations are adaptations to two therapist attributes: (a) failure to absolve the family of initial causal responsibility, and (b) failure to inform the family about the nature of the illness.