Family Therapy: Is Becoming A Doctor Genetic?
Irem Looking Over Family Therapy Resource
Notes In Our Hotel Room
Irem was just looking at some papers she had prepared for our Family Therapy students on Sunday when I heard her make a huge belly laugh. When I asked the source of her mirth she read me this quotation from the book Jay Haley authored in 1980 titled Leaving Home: The Therapy Of Disturbed Young People
“There is more evidence that being a psychiatrist, or certainly being a doctor, is genetic than there is that being a schizophrenic is genetic.”
Now there is much in ‘Leaving Home’ with which I disagree but I think, in this instance, Haley makes an interesting point in an amusing way.
Long ago existential psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterton
This convenient tautology successfully leaves the treatment of diagnosable illness in the hands of organic psychiatry, whilst minimalising alternative approaches on the basis that they do not really treat mental illness.
To be fair to those organic psychiatrists some family therapist, such as Jay Haley, have eschewed ideas such as clinical diagnosis, and even the whole idea of mental illnesses preferring to conceptualise behaviour in terms of systems and stories. In this sense family therapy may not be considered to be a means to treat ‘mental illness’ since the symptoms of such an ‘illness’ aren’t considered as sickness but problems of communication, or family story-line.
Kindly note: For readers who think my journal should be about photography the image above was made as an in-camera .jpeg on the Fuji FinePix E-900 using forced flash.
