Double dealing on families

Saying one thing and doing another is unacceptable behaviour. A fairly common practice – but why is it bothering me now? Let me explain by going back a few steps.

A few referrals recently have made me think yet again that family therapy would be the treatment of choice for a number of young clients. Or at least, a mix of individual and joint sessions, perhaps with mum and child or teen and sibling etc. (If you think this sounds amateurish and do-it-yourself-ish, well the highly respected Richard Bromfield uses this system effectively, as he explains in his latest book – see my Hot off the Press page.)

Now, whichever way you explain families, the Government has rightly pinpointed them as deserving of help.

Take the client who lives with some other family member but whose siblings live with her mum, and the girl visits them frequently. This client experiences huge rage at the unfairness of the sibling “distribution” and is unable to cope with different rules and how she is treated in the two households (in one as a prince, in the other as a visitor), compounded by learning difficulties. Is there any point in offering therapy to the youngster without an intervention with the family too? What constitutes a mental health problem in the child when the family holds the answer?

Again, a therapist I know gets angry on occasions when she feels she is continually “cleaning up” after the mother and that a joint intervention would make more sense. Of course, if the family will accept no part in the trouble, then a referral is not possible.

But it does invite the question of whether everyone working with children and adolescents should gain some training in family therapy in order to be able to do some basic work with the parents and child together. At the least, this would be less of a threat to the parents than a referral to someone new.

Curious about all this and about training, I went to a family therapy website (and another!) to check out some ideas, and then remembered a stumbling block (and this is what I was leading to): the Government has plans to cut back on HE funding for students in England from September 2008 if they are studying for a qualification which is at an equivalent or lower level than one they already have. I think this will affect the majority of students on family therapy training (and probably also those who will be forced to undertake “proper” training for working with children and young people if and when regulation produces such a requirement).

Does anyone see a problem here? The Government is constantly protesting the importance of family, and there’s a clear need for therapists to help families who are struggling. Therefore, such a funding decision is untenable. It’s double dealing.

Giving with one hand and taking away with the other smacks more of seven-year-old trickery in the playground than mature government ministers thinking things through openly and honestly. I think, at last, I may be going to put finger to keyboard and tell them so. Clearly, the other four fingers will be in my pocket financing my own training as usual.