The importance of the family in mental health

The family determines how we are in many ways. Our parents, siblings, grandparents and even uncles and cousins ​​teach us values, customs, our mother tongue and way of relating to others, aspects that make up our identity and personality.

However, for better or for worse the family also conditions our emotional stability, offering us a stable and healthy environment in the one that we can develop adequately or, on the contrary, an environment marked by insecurity and uncertainty, which destabilizes us.

The importance of the family in mental health is a fact, a reality that we are going to explore and analyze below.

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Why does family matter in mental health?

The family plays a fundamental role in the lives of most people. There are many situations in which important decisions are made based on the family, what has taught throughout life, its well-being and the way we relate to it once we are adults.

Relationships with our family nucleus greatly determine our way of being and how we relate to other people, being a factor that also has a great impact on our mental health.

In all families there are events that test our mental health and condition it. There are milder ones, such as a momentary argument between our parents, and there are more serious ones, such as a divorce or the loss of a parent at an early age. Living these situations when we are small influences our emotional stability, being able to living especially intensely and, if it doesn't end well, leading to problems psychological.

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The family: an environment that conditions our life

The family is an environment that conditions our life and, of course, our mental health. The ideal means for a person to always grow up is the healthy and functional family, regardless of its structure and whether or not there are blood ties between its members.. To this day we know that the fact that a family has a father and a mother, is single parent or is a Homosexual marriage does not condition the health of the individual, but rather the parental style that parents exercise towards their sons.

Every functional family is one in which fathers and mothers know how to educate their children well, they raise them in an environment in which affection and love is well present, but without letting the boys and girls do whatever comes their way win. The key is to know how to give love while being responsible in caring for children, applying a democratic parenting system, and fulfilling the three main functions that every good father and mother must fulfill: protection, care and affection.

If as children they gave us adequate protection, care and affection, we also learned that they are what we must provide to our children, which works as a protective factor both when we develop mental disorders and when our children develop it. On the other hand, if these needs were not satisfied, it is more difficult for us to offer them to our children without the help of other partners in the upbringing, since we cannot provide what we do not have or receive, unless we learn it consciously and voluntarily once we are Adults.

That we have reduced parenting to three basic functions does not mean that they are easy. Giving protection, care and affection to our sons and daughters is a complicated task, which requires deep reflection, patience and self-knowledge, in order to Identify mistakes that we may make in our way of raising children that, even if we do not realize it, can have a very negative effect on the health of our children. sons. While all good parents want the best for their children, this does not mean that they comply, even if they do not do so with malicious intent..

For example, comments such as “you're stupid”, “don't be dramatic to me”, “you could do much better” and so on, far from “motivating” them can make them think that they are worthless, that they are not valued even by their own parents and, taking into account the importance that our parents and other figures of authority in our growth, this greatly harms their mental health, especially their self-esteem, self-concept and way of relating to others. the rest.

In addition, children, be they children or adolescents, learn to behave according to what they see in their parents. If a son or daughter behaves disrespectfully towards her parents, far from thinking that it is because she is a bad person or because she is a black sheep, it is quite likely that she behaves like this because considers that his parents do not respect him or, also, because his parents have behaved in a disrespectful way both with him and with other people in the family environment, such as grandparents, siblings, uncles or cousins.

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Mental health of a family with a member with psychopathology

In most cases, a family member with a mental disorder is a serious setback for the family, especially for the person who is going to take care of it. Family members can feel very overwhelmed and stressed when they see how a person they have known for a long time changes, stops being how it was before and now requires a lot of care. The psychopathology of a loved one is experienced as a loss and, at the same time, as the acquisition of a heavy burden.

Family members of people with mental disorders are more likely to experience feelings of pain and loss, which, although they increase and decrease throughout life, end up becoming a profound and intense chronic pain. Live in a constant roller coaster, the ups and downs of which depend directly on the relapses and remissions of the psychopathology of the family member in charge.

Like families in general, families with a member with a mental disorder represent a diverse group. Each family member has unique experiences, needs, and concerns. Thus, each family can behave differently with their relative, depending on the diagnosis and the resources they have.

Over time, although with great difficulty and with the help of psychologists and support groups, the family members who care for the member with a mental disorder they end up accepting their symptoms, learning to cope with the disorder and manage it in the best way possible. Nevertheless, this does not take away the deep emotional pain, stress and anxiety that they experience as a result of having to care for a mentally unstable person, problems that can cause them to also present a mental disorder.

This is especially noticeable in families whose member with psychopathology presents some personality disorder, schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder and has little awareness of his disorder. It is hard to have to put up with a person who is incoherent in their behavior, who changes their mind constantly and who blames others for their mistakes. others or, even, it is invented that it receives some type of aggression when, perhaps, it is he or she who, without realizing it, exercises psychological abuse to the people who take care.

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Family as the origin of psychopathology

Families that do not know how to deal with moments of crisis in a healthy way and do not offer an environment of peace and emotional stability end up weakening. In fact, these kinds of families, Instead of promoting the healthy development of each of its members, it can become a risk factor in their mental health. Abuses, mistreatments, addictions and overly authoritarian parenting contribute to the appearance of traumas, frustrations and various psychopathological symptoms that will eventually crystallize and become a mental disorder in adulthood if it is not treaties.

One television program that reflects this sad reality is the American documentary series "My 600-lb Life." This program tells the story of people who have obesity type IV and that they have remained bedridden, unable to move freely even to relieve themselves and that in order to survive in the long term they need a surgical intervention.

People who reach weights over 250 kilos do not reach this weight out of sheer carelessness or laziness. A person does not reach a body mass index of 80 by sitting on the couch one day, opening a bag of chips and eating until one day he realizes how much he has put on weight. The “stars” of this show have eating behavior problems, a food addiction that is the result of having had a childhood marked by violence, economic poverty and, in many cases, addictions and sexual abuse of people close.

The relationship between program participants and their families is extremely dysfunctional, and not only because of the family past but also because of the present. The family, far from being an emotional support for the person with extreme obesity and a motivator for change, in many Sometimes it configures the environment that has led to that situation, causing her a lot of stress that pushes her to eat.

In other cases, it is often the case that parents feel a lot of guilt because of what happened to your child during childhood, especially if an uncle or a family friend sexually abused their child and they did not realize it or they themselves were drug addicted parents and negligent. To compensate for not having been there for them in their childhood, it often happens that parents become “enablers” (“facilitators”), bringing and cooking the food themselves, since their adult son of almost 300 kilos is bedridden and cannot go shopping for his bill.

All this shows the power that the family has in the development of psychopathology and in its preservation. Dysfunctional childhoods are an important source of mental disorders, and dysfunctional adults contribute to maintaining psychopathology. Families with toxic, dysfunctional and pathological dynamics make patients, in this case morbidly obese, unable to progress or achieve their short, medium and long term goals.