Director: Evan Imber-Black, PhD
Assistant Director: Lisa Lavelle, LCSW

• What is the impact of illness on family well-being?
• How does it affect couple, parent-child and intergenerational relationships?
• How do family relationships affect the course of an illness?

The Ackerman Center for Families and Health, under the leadership of Evan Imber-Black, PhD, addresses the profound challenges posed by illness to families, patients and their medical providers.

"During the two years that my father struggled with colon cancer, my family spent long hours at the hospital. My mother experienced depression and anxiety as she watched my father deteriorate. My siblings and I seemed to engage in old patterns of jealousy and competition that we hadn’t shown in decades. Not once, in all the time my father was in and out of the hospital, did anyone on the staff offer to meet with us as a family. Our relationships were disintegrating.

A friend encouraged us to contact the Center for Families and Health at the Ackerman Institute. The therapists met with us as a family, helped my mom to cope, and enabled my brothers and I to sort out our old differences that this cancer had brought back to life. They walked along side of us through my father’s final illness and death. We came through this terrible loss as a stronger family."

The Center for Families and Health offers effective Family Therapy treatment and research for families experiencing acute, chronic or life-threatening illness. Collaboration and training for medical professionals and allied health care professions is provided as well as consultations with health care facilities and staff. Assistance is also given to families and patients facing the complexities of new medical technologies.

Using Multiple Family Discussion Groups, many of the Center's projects offer support, bringing families together who are confronting and living with illness to meet with other families in similar situations. Families gain an understanding of how the illness itself impacts family relationships. They learn how best to find a way to respect that there is an illness while keeping the illness in its place, without allowing it to control all aspects of the family's life. The Center for Families and Health Multiple Family Discussion Groups pays particular attention to the burden of multiple illnesses occurring in the same family. The Center’s research with MFDG’s focuses on low-income families of color.