There is a great deal of literature over the past 20 years that demonstrates the needs of families impacted by mental health challenges which you can read about here:

The Irish College of Psychiatrists paper by Refocus (2013) highlights the importance of recognising the crucial role carers play in supporting their loved one with mental health challenges.

The Family Recovery Guidance Document 2018 – 2020 outlines steps each Community Health Care Service can take to ensure promoting family recovery is one of the key priorities in terms of service development.

The initial period prior to and after diagnosis of a major mental health challenge has been identified in the literature as a time of acute crises for many families.  During this time family members need to receive information about emotional supports available, how the service operates and guidance from the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) if possible around how they can best respond  to their loved ones distress.

Another key finding is the benefit to family members by focusing on their own wellness and recovery.  This can be done in a number of ways, such as focusing on their own self-care by doing activities they enjoy and connecting with people who they can confide in and trust.  Informing themselves about the service and how it works so that they can advocate effectively and by reaching out to others in a similar situation can be really helpful.

Evidence for Family Peer Support

There is evidence to show that individual family peer support is beneficial to family members.  In a study of youth mental health, it was found that professional family peer involvement resulted in an increase in family empowerment, coping skills and self-efficacy.  In an evaluation of the paid consumer consultant role in a youth mental health inpatient unit in Brisbane, it was suggested that the family peer worker has a dual benefit in terms of education of staff and in empowering families in acute distress.  The role of the paid family peer worker showed its strength in the partnership it built between teams and families so that families can be offered a better range of interventions. See link below for more:

Further evidence for the approach is outlined in the HSE National Clinical Programme for Early Intervention in Psychosis. See below:

Group work and Family Education Courses

Connecting with others through family education or support groups has also been shown to be of benefit to families and assist them to feel supported in their role.  It allows family members to meet with others in a similar situation and can help reduce stigma, isolation and assist the family members to learn more coping skills.  Mental Health Support groups such as Aware and Shine run family education programmes in Ireland and

Recovery Colleges also offer family recovery education programmes.  You can read about this at the following links.

Family Interventions

Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder and Eating Disorder therapeutic programmes offer family focused programmes which you can read about at the following links.

There is a significant amount of evidence in terms of the benefits of family work for the service user in terms of preventing relapse.  This is for the most part focused on early psychosis and shows that family interventions that include the service user can help reduce relapse when combined with medication as compared with medication alone.  Behavioural Family Therapy is the family work approach by the National Clinical Programme for Early Intervention in Psychosis and meets the NICE criteria for whole family interventions and can be accessed here:

Family Talk is a whole family intervention for children of people with mental health difficulties which are currently available in the Community Healthcare Organisation (CHO2).  You can read more about this here.

The link below also provides more information.

See this short video where people talk about the benefits of Family Talk and how the programme has helped them.

The PRIMERA (Promoting Research and Innovation in Mental hEalth seRvices for fAmilies) programme shows how best to support families where a parent has a diagnosed of a mental health illness/ challenge.

Additional Information