Family therapy can help you improve troubled relationships with your spouse, children, or other family members. You may address specific issues such as marital or financial problems, conflict between parents and children, or the impact of substance abuse or a mental illness on the entire family.
Mental health services are a modern phenomenon on an ancient custom. Since the dawning of mankind, we as a species have relied on each other for our very existence. For millennia, people have turned to the “wise ones” in order to help. Those “wise ones” were often elders or shamans and medicine men. In the modern era, we have proscribed and regulated those that help into professions.
Modern medicine has been very effective at helping to increase the longevity and overall health of all. According to the CIA Sourcebook, U.S. life expectancy is approximately almost eighty (80) years of age with the longest life expectancy belonging to Monaco at almost 90 years. With so many staying healthy for so long, there is a need for specialists. One of those specialists is in emotional or psychological issues.
The treatment of emotional or psychological problems can be traced to antiquity. The ancient Greeks were the first to identify mental illness as a medical condition, rather than a sign of evil spirits or deities. While their understanding of the nature of mental illness was not always correct (such as they believed that hysteria affected only women) and some of their treatments were rather bizarre or downright unusual (e.g., bathing for depression, blood-letting for psychosis), as a whole, they did recognize the therapeutic intervention of encouraging and consoling words.