Family and mental health

Components - Dynamics - Processes

Author's name: Mustafa Hijazi

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The family in our societies constitutes the nucleus of the network of institutions that regulate human life and frame its activities. To the extent that its psychological health, competence, and empowerment enable it to raise healthy, empowered, and socially and economically active generations, it will be able to raise healthy, empowered, and socially and economically active generations. Hence, the importance of researching family mental health, studying its components, and methods for enhancing it. This work serves precisely these goals. It is not merely an academic, theoretical cognitive tool; rather, it primarily seeks to provide practical perspectives that help build family mental and life health, both marital and parental. Therefore, in its successive chapters, it presents a set of components of family mental health, the elements of each component, and methods for developing and enhancing them. Each chapter presents the theoretical foundations of its topic, then turns to presenting implementation mechanisms capable of providing the tools that serve both the family and those working with it, in achieving the goals of family development and empowerment, leading to building a healthy family. These practical tasks have become increasingly urgent in working with the contemporary family, which is undergoing a period of successive transformations brought with it by both rapid urbanization and globalization, with all their growing opportunities and challenges. The era of stable living, where the family was established and lived within known and predetermined frameworks, is over. The contemporary family, which lacks these fixed and stable frameworks, needs to enjoy, along with its members—starting with the spouses and parents—capabilities, especially the adaptive fitness required for the age of acceleration and uncertainty imposed by globalization, which is governed by the law of power in all its manifestations, whether at the level of states, societies, or families and their members. This requires the contemporary family to possess all the elements of capacity and empowerment; only in this way can it build its immunity against the multiplying dangers.