Medical Family and Systemic Psychotherapy

Dr Jenny Altschuler is a Systemic Family Psychotherapist and Clinical Psychologist who worked for the NHS for much of her professional life, including at the Royal Free Hospital and later the Tavistock Clinic, where in addition to seeing families facing a wide range of issues, teaching and supervising systemic family psychotherapists and clinical psychologists, she established a service for families facing life limiting medical conditions and disabilities, and developed the first UK-based training for healthcare professionals working with families facing illness, disability and death. She is now offering supervising to healthcare professionals and therapy to families facing illness, refugees and other migrants.Dr Sarah Helps (BSc, MSc, DClinPsy, DProf, FHEA) is a consultant clinical psychologist and systemic psychotherapist. She is Chief Psychological Professions Officer at a large acute hospital in the North East of England. She is systemic lead on the Doctoral programme in Clinical Psychology at Kings College London. Her research interests currently involve exploring how communication works in family and systemic psychotherapy and how to embrace creative ways of working within family and systemic psychotherapy.

• Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Isolation in Becoming a Parent: The Silenced Distress of Infertility and Pregnancy Loss.- Chapter 3 Combining family therapy and clinical psychology provision for neonatal families.- Chapter 4  From flying solo to soaring together: developing systemic practices in paediatric healthcare.- Chapter 5 From Psychologist to Grandma: A Personal Journey with Diabetes.- Chapter 6 A systemic approach to groupwork for family and friends of people living with cancer.- Chapter 7 ‘It’s like I’m suffocating, I can’t get enough air’: Systemic psychological therapy in a specialist asthma service.- Chapter 8 Therapeutic Support to Families Living with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) within Systemic and Narrative practice.- Chapter 9 Helping residents, family and staff supporting older people in care homes by applying systemic ideas and techniques.- Chapter 10 Systemic work in Primary Care settings.- Chapter 11 Holding the healers: supervision in medical contexts.- Chapter 12 Working above the balcony and below the dance floor: systemic leadership in physical healthcare.- Chapter 13 - Conclusions - Going on together in providing and developing systemic interventions for people with physical health conditions.