Director: Peter Steinglass, MD

Ackerman’s Center for Substance Abuse and the Family (CSAF) is dedicated to the development of treatment models for addressing problems arising in families secondary to substance use and abuse in one or more family members.

In particular, the Center’s work focuses on those situations in which substance abuse is a complicating factor compromising the family’s ability to address crises and/or manage on-going issues in family life, including:

• problems at work
• raising children
• social relationships
• relationships between family members

Our approach focuses on:

• identifying existing resources within families;
• exploring how these resources have been compromised by the demands of substance abuse, and;
• strategizing with families how to reverse this process.

It is our belief that by mobilizing the inherent strengths within families and by working with families to understand how substance use has compromised family relationships, families and clinicians can collaborate in designing strategies for reversing the downward spiral of alcoholism and drug abuse.

By bringing families together to address the previously unrecognized consequences of substance abuse, we offer families the unique opportunity to share perspectives about the impact of alcohol and drugs on their relationships, and to generate new strategies for tackling the unwanted consequences of substance abuse on family life.

In addition to the development of treatment models, the Center’s parallel missions include:

• training mental health and medical professionals how to use family-focused approaches to substance abuse treatment;
• researching the effectiveness of our treatment approaches;
• educating the public about the effects of substance abuse on family life.

Current major training and research projects include collaborations with:

• NYU Bellevue Medical Center’s Division of Substance Abuse Treatment
• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
• The Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London, UK