Abstract
Family involvement in the treatment of severe mental illnesses is an indispensable part of comprehensive care towards recovery. Mutual cooperation, effective communication and a good relationship between the doctor, the patient and his/her family are proven to improve the prognosis of most chronic illnesses.
If we expect patients and their relatives to become competent partners for long-term therapy, we need to share knowledge about the disease and its treatment, provide emotional support, and teach them the skills necessary to successfully manage the illness. Family psychoeducation is an intervention, providing families with relevant knowledge and skills, which empower family climate in recovery, while at the same time setting straight dysfunctional etiological theories of the relatives viewing themselves as the culprits for the development of the disease.
The family psychoeducation is one of the most effective therapeutic approaches in a number of diseases, specifically reducing the relapses of schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder and recurrent depressive disorder. Furthermore psychoeducation reduces the burden of people taking care of patients with dementia, strengthens positive attitudes and skills of relatives patients with Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.
In this review we present the theoretical models of involving patients' families in complex care, we offer thematic areas and suitable arrangements for psychoeducational programs and present requirements for instructors of psychoeducation. In this review we also provide the evidence on the efficacy and argue in favor of the broad introduction of psychoeducation in the context of the current reform of psychiatric care in Czech Republic.