Key words: rehabilitation work psychotic patients, institutional adhesiveness to pathogenic identifications, healthy virtuality, familiar hypnotic order introjected, environmental improving, institutional opportunism
The purpose of this paper is to describe how the authors, Francesca Viola Borgogno and Carmine Pasquale Pismataro, decided to adapt and apply the clinical intervention model developed by Jorge Garcia Badaracco with his multifamiliar therapeutic groups (Garcia Badaracco J, 1990, 2000) in recovery paths and in the project of working re-integration within the offer of the Agenzia Lavoro e Apprendimento (ALA), specifically charged of helping people with mental disorder finding a job.
In particular, the authors’ hypothesis is that the patients during the course of treatment are influenced by the idea that the work can “heal” them (idea born in their family and shared inside the psychiatric institution), but this concept isn’t supported by real egoic resources of patients, who starting working frequently break down.
The trial project started four years ago at the Milan AO Santi Paolo e Carlo DMS (Dipartimento di Salute Mentale). Today this is an integral part of our therapeutic practice: the multifamily group procedures and related dynamics unveiled in terms of insight and empowerment can enable the proper support for potential and virtually healthy resources of patients and families included in rehab paths aimed to social and job integration, as well as improve the communication between caregivers and the quality of intervention.
The goal of our work is, in particular, to ensure to family, patient and professionals a place where is possible to hold talks and think about the impact that the perceived condition of being patient and unemployed has in the everyday life, inside and outside the family, and on the emotional reaction that mutual expectations and projections implicate in terms of self-perception and identity strenght. This relational schema, involving not only the person and the family but also the caring system, allowed our intervention to restore competence to the person, meaning to the language and chance for the future.