Excerpted from NAMI Family-to-Family Program Materials.
By Emalee Gillis, NAMI Spokane Blog Editor.
The NAMI Family-to-Family Program is a free training program that provides information on how friends and family can support a loved one with a mental health condition. One way friends and family can help is to help find a good psychiatrist.
According to NAMI’s Family to Family program, a good psychiatrist for a loved one is a psychiatrist who:
- Will make special efforts to communicate with the family and can speak using terms you understand.
- Won’t insist that your loved one makes the first contact and recognizes that they may be in crisis and unable to do so.
- Will make special efforts to communicate. For instance, taking five minutes in the middle or at the end of a session to ask for patient’s family to share their views on how things are going.
- Recognizes the condition is a no-fault brain disorder.
- Is strong enough not to be threatened by views of the family or the individual about treatment; willing to discuss openly symptoms, medications and side effects, and the limits of his/her knowledge while remaining in command of the treatment. While psychiatrists are trained to be vigilant about boundaries, any psychiatrist who communicates the idea that there is a special mystique in psychiatry that you can’t understand isn’t the kind of doctor you want.
- Is flexible enough to customize treatment for your relative and to enlist families as part of the treatment team when that is indicated, e.g. as observers and reporters on the response to changes in treatment.
- Is innovative enough to consider alternative ways to engage with people who don’t think they have a mental health condition.
- Is accommodating enough to schedule visits at less frequent intervals to match the family’s financial ability, communicates that he/she is more concerned about finding outcomes that satisfy the entire family than about maximizing their own income.
- Takes seriously and respects the information communicated by the family regarding the status of the patient.
The NAMI Family-to-Family program also identifies a list of 20 questions that can be asked of a psychiatrist regarding a loved one:
- What is the diagnosis? What is the nature of this condition from a medical point of view?
- What is known about how we can avoid future episodes or making this disorder worse in the future?
- How certain are you of this diagnosis? If you’re not certain, what other possibilities do you consider most likely, and why?
- Did the physical examination include a neurological exam? If so, how extensive was it and what were the results?
- Are there any additional tests or exams that you would recommend at this point?
- Would you advise an independent opinion from another psychiatrist at this point?
- What program of treatment do you think would be most helpful? How will it be helpful?
- Will the program involve services by other specialists (i.e., neurologist, psychologist, allied health professionals)?
- Who will be able to answer our questions at times when you’re not available?
- What kind of therapy do you plan to use, and what will be the contribution of the psychiatrist to the overall program of treatment?
- What do you expect this program to accomplish? About how long will it take, and how frequently will you and the other specialists be seeing my loved one?
- What will be the best evidence that my loved one is responding to the program, and how soon will it be before their signs appear?
- What do you see as the family’s role in this program of treatment? If particular, how much access will the family have to the individuals who are providing the treatment?
- If your current evaluation is a preliminary one, how soon will it be before you will be able to provide a more definite evaluation of my loved one’s condition?
- What medication do you propose to use? (Ask for name and dosage level). What is the biological effect of this medication and what do you expect it to accomplish? What are the risks associated with the medication? How soon will we be able to tell if the medication is effective, and how will we know?
- Are there other medications that might be appropriate? If so, why do you prefer the one you have chosen?
- Are you currently treating other patients with these symptoms? (Psychiatrists vary in their level of experience with severe or long-term mental health conditions, and it is helpful to know how involved the psychiatrist is with treatment of the kind of problem that your loved one has).
- When are the best times, and what are the most dependable ways for getting in touch with you?
- How do you monitor medications and what symptoms indicate that they should be raised, lowered, or changed?
- How familiar are you with the activities of NAMI and of our NAMI state organization?
NAMI Family-to-Family Educational Course is a free 8-week educational course for family, significant others and friends of people living with mental health conditions. It’s designed to help you support an adult with a mental health condition while maintaining your own wellbeing, too. It meets for 2 ½ hours each week, and each class builds on the knowledge of previous classes.
NAMI Family-to-Family is taught by NAMI-trained family members who have been there, and includes presentations, discussions and interactive exercises. It is a designated evidenced-based program, which means that research shows that Family-to-Family significantly improves the coping and problem-solving abilities of the people closest to a person with a mental health condition.
To find out when the next Family-to-Family Course will be presented, email NAMI Spokane to get class notifications of programs at Amanda@namispokane.org.
Emalee Gillis is a writer and blog editor. She is the author of the memoir Adventures on the Path to Living Well with a Mental Illness and has a related TEDx Talk.