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A significant recent development is to view psychiatric disorders less as the sickness of an individual and more as a disturbance of an entire family system. Consequently, there is often failure to distinguish genuine morbid phenomena from the conflicts from which these arise. Progress is noted less as symptom remission and increased ego strength, and more as enhanced individuation and better communication operating in the family. Such observations as these led to
the inauguration of multiple family group therapy with the families of male inpatients suffering from affective disorders, especially unipolar depressions. In individual family sessions with deeply disturbed patients, the kin could readily become uncontrollably anxious as the therapy appeared to threaten their own self-esteem. These difficulties are less likely to occur when more than one family participates. To some extent this improvement was due to the way in which an individual could identify with another person whose situation and whose family matched his own, or could react to someone in another family with emotions he dared not express at home. Since the best results were apparently achieved when the group was homogeneous, families of depressives were treated separately from families of schizophrenics.