Your Family Might Be Making Your Mental Health Worse

For some, the holiday visit with ones family is a source of warmth and comfort after a hectic year. But for many others, such a period of supposed R&R can be dreaded. Is this warranted? Psychology (and pop-culture) has a history of blaming the family on poor mental health. How fair is this really?

Here’s a strange story. In the 1960s, George Brown, a British sociologist, was observing the clinical outcomes of patients with schizophrenia who were returning from treatment. He noticed that the patients who went to live in lodgings — care facilities that did not involve their families — had pretty positive outcomes in terms of well being and treatment. But what about the patients returning to their partners and parents? Brown found that individuals would often experience a severe relapse of symptoms! How could the comfort of home bring about worse outcomes? He hypothesized that there is the possibility that family relationships could be a factor in schizophrenia relapse.

Over time, Brown, working in collaboration with Michael Rutter, tried to figure out how to measure the “range of feelings and emotions to be found in ordinary families”. Here Brown wasn’t necessarily looking at abusive households or families that were obviously dysfunctional or neglectful. Rather, Brown was searching for more subtle mechanisms that could explain the…