Publications by Dr Charles Fishman
Book: Performance-Based Family Therapy: A Therapist’s Guide to Measurable Change
In this groundbreaking book, which was published by Routledge in 2022, Dr Fishman uniquely incorporates and develops results-based accountability (RBA) into the framework of structural family therapy.
Collaborating with the founder of RBA, Mark Friedman, this approach aims to transform the field of family therapy by allowing clinicians to track performance effectively and efficiently with their clients. The book begins by reviewing the historical foundations of family therapy and evaluates why challenges in the field, alternative methods, and the reliance on evidence-based medicine (EBM) have meant that family therapy may not have flourished to the extent that many of us expected. It then explores how RBA can be integrated into intensive structural therapy (IST), with chapters examining how RBA can be applied in context, such as in treating eating disorders, supervision, and how it can be used to transform the professional’s clinical contexts. Relevant and practical, the book also introduces the community resource specialist to help in the treatment of socially disadvantaged families, as well as practical appendices and “tracking tools” to empower clinicians to track their data and choose treatment models that obtain best outcomes.
This new approach offers transparent and measurable outcomes for both clinicians and training family therapists, lending a helping hand in making family therapy the gold standard in psychotherapy. It is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students of family therapy, course leaders, and all clinicians in professional contexts, such as social workers, psychotherapists, and marriage, couple, and family therapists.
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Book: You Can Fix Your Family
Your family is falling apart and everyone is grudgingly unhappy, the kids are misbehaving and in trouble with the law, your dreams are disintegrating as midlife pokes through, you want your children to thrive and do well.
Trying to solve family problems? This wise, practical book, published in 2013, will guide you. You will find yourself and your family on many of its pages and quickly discover that those precious relationships can be saved and preserved.
Expertly written by Dr Fishman, the book’s principles of change and transformation reach across the many stages of a family life, from “new baby in the house” and “off to school” to “an adolescent has emerged” and “elderly parents come to live”. If you want to know how to fix your family and fix your work environment, this book offers brilliant solutions.
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Article: The power of the family in general practice: Enhance your effectiveness when caring for anorexia nervosa patients
This paper by Charles Fishman and his wife Tana Fishman was published in the August 2006 New Zealand Family Physician Vol. 33 No. 4. More about The power of the family in general practice.
Book: Enduring Change in Eating Disorders
Dr Fishman is the author of “Enduring Change in Eating Disorders – Interventions with long-term results” (Brunner-Routledge 2004). The book draws on specific cases from his fifty years of practice to show the successful treatment of eating disorders using the model of Intensive Structural Therapy.
Individuals with eating disorders describe their experiences in their own words. Readers gain an insight into the treatment sessions involving families. Readers are led through the interventions which are needed for each case as a means to improve the individual’s dynamics with their family and ultimately help them overcome the eating disorder.
Dr Fishman examines the nature of eating disorders – whether they can be effectively treated. The book provides a broad cross-section of case studies of individuals with eating disorders, from children through to adults who have battled with the disease for years. The proven effectiveness of the treatment is shown with follow-up consultations some twenty years after treatment.
This book provides practical information to practitioners as well as individuals with eating disorders and their families.
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Book: Intensive Structural Therapy: Treating Families in Their Social Context
Families today are assailed on all fronts by the profound changes, such as the decline of real wages and the loss in many industries of job security, that have shaken society over the past forty years and forced the monolithic family structure to take on a multitude of new forms, including the now common dual-income family and the single-parent family. With families now more dependent on outside institutions for help and support—from the day care centre to social services to neighbours and friends—family therapy needs a model of intervention that is capable of dealing with the new role these outside institutions and their representatives play in the life of the family.
In this groundbreaking book, published in 1993, Dr Fishman takes this next logical step in the evolution of the treatment of families and details how to assess the broader system supporting and affecting the family and how to intervene effectively. Assessment techniques show how to decide which people and institutions (such as siblings, friends, co-workers, employers, social workers, teachers, clergy) need to be incorporated into the treatment. Dr Fishman outlines how and when representatives of these outside institutions should meet with the therapist and the family. Rich case examples extensively illustrate principles of intervention for working within the family’s context and for identifying who or what is maintaining the dysfunction of the family system. A concluding section reveals that altruism, a side of human nature too easily forgotten or dismissed, is the driving force behind the cooperative spirit regularly shown by participants in intensive structural therapy. This surprising finding is sure to inspire all who help families deal with the stresses of life today.
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Book: Treating Troubled Adolescents: A Family Therapy Approach
In the first half of the twentieth century, therapy for disturbed adolescents focused on individual dynamics or group treatment, and for the most part, did not take into serious consideration adolescents in relation to their families. Adolescent problems were regarded as due mostly to the internal difficulties inherent to the stage of life, and the family was seen mainly as a backdrop to the vicissitudes of personal development.
This book, by one of family therapy’s most creative practitioners, changes all that. Exclusively devoted to elaborating a family therapy model of understanding and treating adolescents, it is a major contribution to the field. It also performs the unique and much-needed function of revitalising the concept of homeostasis, moving it from its status as a general explanation for non-change to that of a useful principle for organising therapeutic dialogue. With exceptional clarity and sensitivity, Dr Fishman shows where and how homeostasis operates in families and how recognising and working with each family’s “homeostatic maintainer” can produce significant change. Any clinician who has been ready to give up in frustration when dealing with the thorny problems of adolescent patients will welcome this thoughtful, practical book (Routledge 1988).
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Book: Evolving Models for Family Change: A Volume in Honor of Salvador Minuchin
Edited with Bernice L. Rosman
Today, the statement that individual behaviour is more fully understood within the context of larger systems may seem unremarkable and uncontroversial. That it appears uncontroversial is itself a tribute to the work of visionary and tenacious thinkers like Salvador Minuchin, whose insistence on the importance of family context in the understanding of individual behaviour – at a time when clinical psychology and psychiatry were still wedded to the view that the person was the basic unit of therapeutic meaning – brought about a radical shift in psychotherapeutic assumptions.
Evolving Models for Family Change (The Guilford Press 1986), commemorating Salvador Minuchin’s retirement from the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, is a thought-provoking summary of the state of the art of family therapy. Far from regaling the reader with the successes of the family model, the contributors expand the application and scope of the paradigm and, in some cases, question basic tenets that have become articles of faith for many therapists.
Book: Family Therapy Techniques
With Salvador Minuchin
A master of family therapy, Salvador Minuchin, traces for the first time the minute operations of day-to-day practice. Dr Minuchin has achieved renown for his theoretical breakthroughs and his success at treatment. Now he explains in close detail those precise and difficult maneuvers that constitute his art. The book (Harvard University Press 1981) thus codifies the method of one of the country’s most successful practitioners.
