If a patient’s relatives have information about their illness or disorder, everything will be much easier. That is psychoeducation.
The psychoeducation It is “a therapeutic approach in which a patient’s family members are provided with specific information about the disease, and training in techniques to cope with the problem.”
The family care should primarily result in patient benefit and its objective is to improve the quality of life of patient and family creating environments low in stressors, and thus reducing the probability of relapse and family burden.
More specifically, the aim is for the patient’s vulnerability to decrease, and for their cognitive functioning and motivation to improve. On the other hand, it is sought that family members’ anxiety decreases through support, structure and information about the disease. Two important elements stand out from the included definition, which will ultimately become the components of psychoeducational work.
On the one hand, the information that can be offered, that is, the knowledge that is available about the disease and that they are organized, systematized and presented in a clear, agile and timely manner, and on the other hand, the functional value who acquire this knowledge, while they are transformed into behaviors aimed at achieving adaptation and improving the quality of life of the patient and family. These behaviors have also been called competencies (Varela, 1999).
We know that in the families of psychotic patients, rigid interaction schemes have been crystallizing that lead the entire family system to relate in a stereotypical way.
Identifying and naming a problem or problematic behavior helps demystify it and allows it to be observable (and therefore modifiable). This does not mean that simply naming the problems is enough to change a pattern as persistent and long-lasting as the one that characterizes Personality Disorders, but it is a good start.
