Family Therapy in India: Benefits and Barriers

Family is like a human body where every part is affected by the other. Being the centerpiece in the Indian society, it feels great to have a family and at times a huge challenge. The family members, youth, couple, adults, all have some good and bad experiences in a family. But the personal and relational difficulties lead to opportunities for developing a wide variety of psychological problems like mental and physical illness, family conflicts, cultural adjustments, ageing, eating disorder, divorce, trauma thereby creating demands for family therapy. Thus, the current review attempts to highlight the concept of family therapy. The present paper also focus on goals and need of family therapy with its major emphasis on how family therapy helps in supporting and better understanding each other's view, enabling individuals to explore, express and experience emotions, working on strengthening relationships. Therefore, the later section of the review focuses on the benefits of family therapy from children to adults and couple to families. However, the roots of family therapy are about half a century old, yet the concept and practice has not been widely accepted especially in a culturally and religiously diverse country like India. There are potential barriers and cultural issues in providing the services. Thus, there is a strong call for involvement of family in providing therapies and mental health services in order to get solutions beyond any constraints.