Many forms of severe mental illness have biological origins. Nonetheless, the kinds of family environments that psychiatric patients live in are reliably associated with how likely patients are to relapse. This article describes some characteristics of families that place patients at increased risk for relapse, and outlines the behaviors that such families engage in. Behavior in these families is not especially pathological, but because psychiatric patients may be especially sensitive to stress, even fairly common characteristics of family life may trigger underlying biological vulnerabilities that could eventually culminate in relapse.
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