Working with Families of the Poor

by Patricia Minuchin, Jorge Colapinto, Salvador Minuchin

This eagerly awaited volume draws upon the authors' many years of experience in the inner city to provide vital guidance to therapists working with poor families. While standard counseling models are often limited to individual persons and their problems, this book emphasizes the importance of understanding individual needs within a larger family framework, and considering the family itself within broader organizational and community contexts. Weaving in numerous case histories and examples of practical interventions, the authors demonstrate how their inventive approach can be used to draw out clients' strengths and to make the most of limited social service resources. Readers will learn new techniques to gather information, reframe family assumptions, handle conflict, and explore alternative patterns of interaction. In addition, the authors show therapists how to increase the level of collaboration between poor families and the multiple agencies that provide assistance with foster care, substance abuse counseling, perinatal programs, residential and psychiatric centers for children, and home-based services.

Genres: Psychology

259 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 1998

Reviews

[Alcqueline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth Reading

This book was insightful I read it for a social work course. I learned a good deal about the best way to work with families in therapy. I gave it 3 stars only because this was not a personal reading choice.

[Jean-Paul Eberle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a significant reminder and contribution to the field of community mental health specifically. It emphasizes the unavoidable salience of holding our fantasy of the individual with "diagnoses" within the perspective of the broader context of the reality of embedded relational systems. The consequent influence is increased conscientiousness and intentionality regarding how we orient to service delivery and who's involved as stakeholders. A useful read to dip into.