Clinical Special Event

Steffany J. Fredman, Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School

Thursday, April 19, 2012, 10:00 am – 11:00 am
4448  East Hall

Event Information

The field of couple/family psychopathology has historically focused on improving the emotional climate in which a psychiatric patient resides as a way of improving the patient’s mental health symptoms and the couple/family’s relationship functioning. More recently, efforts have expanded to include the targeting of maladaptive family interactional processes focal to a particular form of psychopathology as an essential strategy for optimizing both individual and relationship outcomes. In this talk, I will discuss my work in the area of mood and anxiety disorders to illustrate the importance of improving the affective milieu of the home and modifying unhelpful ways that couples and families relate around the disorder, such as family accommodation to patients’ symptoms. As an illustration, I will apply this framework to the development and validation of Cognitive-Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD (Monson & Fredman, in press) and will describe my ongoing work on a disorder-specific assessment strategy to identify ways that partner accommodation to patient PTSD symptoms may interfere with recovery from the disorder.