Should Practitioners Offer Single- or Multifamily Group Services?
When directly compared, single family formats have been found to be more effective for consumers who have an unusually positive response to medication, whose families are unusually emotionally resilient and have already developed good coping skills and are from minority groups, especially if they are African-American. Psychoeducational multifamily groups have been shown to be much more effective in highly-stressed and highly exasperated families in which medication and other treatments have not been fully effective and when the family is already hampered by divorce, medical illness, separation or refusal of siblings to support the relatives. Psychoeducational multifamily groups have also been found to be more effective in the first episode. Thus, a fully functioning service for a wide variety of consumers would best offer both formats. On the other hand, psychoeducational multifamily groups are at least twice as cost-effective, so in some financially stressed services, multifamily grou
