Multifamily Psychoanalysis Groups facilitates communication among patients, family members, professionals and services, improving the intervention

Starting a Multi-Family Psychoanalysis Group (MFPG) in  each of the facilities that are part of a National Health Mental Health Department (MHD) is the first step for bulding a MHD with a Multi-Family structure. Having... [ view full abstract ]

Starting a Multi-Family Psychoanalysis Group (MFPG) in  each of the facilities that are part of a National Health Mental Health Department (MHD) is the first step for bulding a MHD with a Multi-Family structure.

1. Having several MFPGs in a MHD is a chance for collecting data and experiences about the patients and their families, i.e. for giving meaning to the informations. This allows for the formulation of an explanatory hypothesis by which one can better understand how things went, and how to have things going in a way that is more consistent with the way people sharing that story feel.
2. In the mind of each operator, regardless of the level of training, there are two systems of organization of clinical data: the psychiatric one and the psychotherapeutic one. MFPGs facilitate a process of integration in the mind of each operator. Such integration is about the psychiatric way of looking at the clinical reality of patients and their relatives on one hand, and the psychotherapeutic way of interpreting and rewriting the events on the other.
3. The growing culture of the intervention based on the use of MFPGs induces a refreshed capability of dialogue and discussion among operators from the same facility or from different facilities that are part of a Department. So each facility does not work on its own. Rather, different facilities,  in charge of the same patient in different consecutive moments, start to interact with each other as soon as the patient is admitted to any of them. This way different facilities can be thought of as different steps of a therapeutic path, and they can also plan together the current and the future intervention, as the coordinated action of each facility.

A short video will illustrate the functioning of MFPG.