ABSTRACT
Family relationships and interactions can have a profound effect on people’s mental health. At the same time, mental health problems can be major disruptors of family relationships. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the historical developments in theories of family interaction and mental health. Next, several pathogenic family of origin interactions, including parental affectionless control, communication deviance, expressed emotion, and family conflict, are discussed. These dysfunctional family processes have been linked to mental health problems such as depression, schizophrenia, feeding and eating disorders, personality disorders, bipolar disorder, and loneliness. Next, dysfunction family or orientation antecedents and consequences to mental health problems are presented. These family communication phenomena include dysfunctional marital interaction, emotional contagion, and maladaptive parenting and have been linked with depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders, and anxiety disorders. Collectively, this research shows that dysfunctional family communication and family relationships have extraordinary potential to disrupt mental health and that a family member’s mental health problem had comparably deleterious consequences for the functioning of family relations.
