Autistic Family

Family strategies cannot begin without the well being of the primary caregiver. The primary caregiver has to be strong mentally in order to lead the family in the right direction. The correlation between mothers having autistic children and psychological distress is increased because their s a low level of informal support. Mothers are at risk of themselves experiencing high levels of psychological distress, and that levels of reported distress are associated with high levels of child behavior problems and low levels of informal support within the family. Remedies for this are tough to find because its not being focused on at the time being. With this happening,
During this process some family members decided to ostracize themselves from
the family due to the levels of stress and how stigmatized they feel For instance, whenever family members come over to visit, they realize how severe it is to be around a mentally ill person. At This was disappointing because you would think that the family’s values will be able to surpass a mental illness. However, some family members can’t deal with the pressure that comes with it. Family members are being placed in bad positions to endure the pain of the ill member is something that cannot be taught. Studies from Grunbaum, proves that family members feel like they are immediately involved. This aspect makes them scared with being active members because its something that not a lot of people can deal with on a day to day basis.
Particular members of the family that should stick around don’t, because they don’t fully understand the concept of a particular mental disorder.
The implicit and sometimes explicit message is that the illness is their families fault and now the leave the professional to undo the damage. This is important to understand because at times families don’t look into the individual as much as they should. By this happening it shows that the family is also at fault because they didn’t seek knowledge or try to find information about the illness.
Furthermore, the neighbors created social barriers for my brother because of the way he acted while growing up. The neighbors never felt comfortable knowing that my brother could disturb the peace at any given moment and by not having that understanding, on several occasions there would be a police officer coming to the house and asking questions. The neighbors are important because if they had a basic understanding then the conflicts that we get into with the police could be avoided. This type of social barrier makes it even more complicated to live because if you don’t have family support and the neighborhood isn’t willing to understand, it makes life much
harder.
However, for those family members that do decide to stick around, it helps the family out as a collective . Dressler believed in the extended kin network which is known as the sum of the number of siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles that is present when it comes to supporting the person with the mental illness. Without the extended kin network, you wont be able to quantify the extended kin support which is the amount of support a mentally ill person receives from their family. In 1981, used the black communities from Westside, Alabama to show the variances of support in a study that lacks evidence.
An intriguing study between the Westside community and the predominantly non black community in Southern California showed a major contrast. The non kin support system proved to be a method of happiness for them whereas the kin support systems more effective for the black community. I found this to be interesting because it proves that the white community believes in other methods of intervening more than the black community would. The black community has a stronger focus on their kinship and family bonds. This is happening because for the black community having a stronger kinship and support is imperative for the development of the family and the mentally ill member of the particular family. Kinship is important to understand in order to create methods of intervening for mentally ill people within the family.
African Americans and Black Caribbean’s both value their families over using outside support. However, the Haitian community values the four step approach when it comes to dealing with a mentally ill person. According to Schantz, the four step model for Haitian Americans includes: self-family treatment, cultural, religion and biomedical treatment.
They initially practice self family treatment by using hot and cold remedies such as special tea or ice.
In addition, they use cultural treatment methods such as using special oil to put on the child’s body and let them “sleep it off”. After that, they go to church and try to follow the correct path to their god. After a plethora of remedies and failed attempts, they seek medical attention. However, by the time they decide to receive the attention, it could be too late because they wasted time doing other ineffective methods of intervening. The four step model is relevant for other Caribbean Americans because its something that is
universal.
For Haitians and other Caribbean Americans, they shy away from telling a medical professional that their child has a behavioral problem. They have a certain level of pride that wont allows them to appear vulnerable. For instance, were born with a huge amount of confidence that our own methods of “healing” are more effective than anything else. This started since way back because they felt the need to be independent. With this happening it makes it hard to make the family understand what to do in a situation such as this. The remedies are usually based on the assumed effectiveness of using hot and cold remedies. They believed that everything could be cured by prayer and a special tea. However, the use of home remedies other than tea wasn’t as prevalent, its mostly used for the chemical imbalance of hot and cold factors.in order to find out about these remedies it took a lot of work because the families were reluctant on exposing their culture. They finally realized that these remedies had no effect for mental illness because nothing changed. The family’s dynamic is important for the development of the child’s mental illness; the way the family interacts with one another is crucial.