DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO FAMILY SYSTEMS RESEARCH

Guillermo Bernal, Ph.D.
                By Celia Jaes Falicov, Ph.D.
 
     Over the past 30 years, Guillermo Bernal has made an outstanding contribution to family therapy research. He has published 120 journal articles, chapters and six books. The research topics have dealt with intergenerational family therapy for drug abuse, treatment for depression in ethnic minorities and a variety of culturally centered psychosocial interventions.
    Grounded in systems and ecological thinking, Bernal’s career has strong underpinnings in humanistic ideas and Latin American political philosophy. Thoughtful about ideology and scientific rigor, he critically transforms mainstream therapies to make them relevant to underserved populations. His forthcoming co-authored book is fittingly titled: “Cultural Adaptations: Tools for Evidence-Based Practices with Diverse Populations”.
    The same commitment to inclusiveness of minorities is mirrored in Guillermo’s generosity towards the development of the next generation of researchers, mentoring them at the university and the high school level. He is a strong role model for integrating culture into clinical research.
    Since 2004, Bernal has provided superb service to Family Process as Associate Editor of Research.  He serves on numerous journal editorial boards and is a Fellow of several APA divisions. He has also served as President of APA’s Division 45, the Society for the Study of Ethnic Minorities.
    From his native Cuba to his current position as Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute of Psychological Research at the University of Puerto Rico, Guillermo has been shaped by many U.S. and Latin American contexts and has in turn, transformed these contexts through his capacity for collaboration and social activism. He knows how to navigate the large systems of NIMH and NIDA and harness their resources to improve services to minorities.
The AFTA 2009 Research Award goes proudly to Guillermo Bernal for a very significant body of research that integrates the personal, the professional and the political with vision, courage and commitment.

DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO FAMILY THERAPY THEORY AND PRACTICE

Charles Figley, Ph.D.
             By Froma Walsh, Ph.D.

    Charles R. Figley, Ph.D. is the Paul Henry Kurzweg, MD Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health and professor of social work at Tulane University. Previously, he founded and directed the Traumatology Institute at Florida State University. Dr. Figley has received many awards over his long career. His major contributions to science and practice have focused on understanding and helping families in the wake of major trauma and catastrophic events. Dr. Figley has been extraordinarily prolific, with more than 80 articles and chapters, and 20 edited books, including Stress and the Family (1983); Helping Traumatized Families (1989); and Burnout in Families: The Systemic Cost of Caring (1998). He was the founding editor of Journal of Family Psychotherapy; Traumatology;  and Journal of Traumatic Stress. He was co-founder and president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and active in Green Cross Academy of Traumatology.  This brief tribute highlights just a few of his significant contributions.
    In the 1970s, Dr. Figley was at the forefront of clinical researchers in developing an understanding of post-traumatic stress. His paper, "Psychosocial Adjustment among Vietnam Veterans," was influential in the inclusion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the APA’s 3rd revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). He expanded his own inquiry to the psychosocial impact of widespread community disasters.
    Over three decades, as theory, research, and practice in the trauma field has remained individually focused, Dr. Figley has championed a systemic approach, addressing the recursive influences of trauma in family networks. He brought attention to secondary traumatization of family members, especially partners, in hearing about past trauma of loved ones and experiencing their ongoing struggles. He has advocated for the importance of addressing the family impact of trauma in treatment.
    Dr. Figley has also advanced our understanding of compassion fatigue, commonly experienced by professionals, including family therapists, who work with trauma. In a recent autobiographical chapter in Mapping Trauma and its Wake, he poignantly described his own struggle with compassion fatigue in personally interviewing hundreds of combat veterans and their families.
    In his new leadership of Disaster Mental Health Research at Tulane Dr. Figley brings special attention to New Orleans family and community resilience since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.  He brings his own remarkable resilience to the challenge.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Dick Chasin, M.D.
             Sallyann Roth, M.S.W.

    There is no summing up Dick Chasin—scholar, writer, humanitarian, philanthropist, citizen-diplomat, therapist-innovator, psychodramatist, systems thinker, unequalled child conversationalist. But sum up I must. At the core, Dick is a healer and a pragmatist.
    Born in Brooklyn to poor uneducated immigrants, he catapulted to the Ivy League via a full scholarship to Yale at age fifteen.
    In 1961, as a psychiatry resident, he held family sessions. Innocent of systems theory, he did so as a matter of expediency, compassion, and common sense.
    He soon discovered and immersed himself in the emerging field of family therapy. His primary professional goal became to advance the status of family therapy within mental health and in the public mind. He has pursued this mission with industry, creativity, and generosity.
    He has advanced family therapy during thirty years as a Harvard psychiatry professor, twenty years of co-directing the Family Institute of Cambridge, and thirty years of AFTA membership, including the presidency in 1993-1995.
    Dick also extended his talents to non-clinical areas.
    He co-designed and taught the interpersonal skills section that remains central to Harvard Law School’s popular, intensive one-month workshop on negotiation, which typically includes graduate students from dozens of countries.
    In philanthropy, he has served for the past decade on the committee that selects annually the winner of the Council on Foundations’ Creative Grantmaker Award.
    He was a delegate to annual Congresses of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), where he created and led powerful workshops on stereotyping. IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
    He is a Founding Associate of the Public Conversations Project.
    Dick is modest, even silent, about his achievements. He squanders no time, energy, or opportunity by focusing on ego. It would only distract him from preventing and healing individual and social ills on intimate and global scales.

INNOVATIVE CONTRIBUTION TO FAMILY THERAPY

Jill Freedman, M.S.W., and Gene Combs, M.D.
             by Vicki Dickersion, Ph.D.

    Jill Freedman and Gene Combs are names that have become synonymous with the growth of the narrative approach in the northern hemisphere. From the publication of their rich and inclusive book Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities in 1996, to their hosting a North American Narrative Conference in Evanston, Illinois in 2003, to their world-wide teaching, Jill and Gene have had a sustaining impact on the teaching and learning of post-structural narrative ideas and practices.
    Their acknowledgement of so many who have contributed to the evolution of thinking and work in the field of family therapy is a tribute to their respect for and sensitivity to those with whom they work. Their book is a masterpiece of understanding of what has gone before while still being well ahead of the cutting edge. It has made narrative thinking and work accessible to people worldwide--from a psychiatrist in Nicaragua to a psychology student in China. They also have many other publications, have presented at all nine of the International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conferences, and are consistently being invited to teach in international venues.
    Currenty Gene and Jill are consulting to a myriad of organizations--nicely documented in a forthcoming article in Family Process that describes their consultation work and situates it in Michael White's work with communities. They, too, are immersed in such work, having traveled twice to Rwanda and working with a community group there.
    I have known Jill and Gene for twenty years. If I want someone to help me notice something I have taken for granted and need someone to help me think through a particularly complex issue, it is to Gene and Jill that I inexorably turn.
    The AFTA Award for Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy is well deserved!

      

DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIAL JUSTICE

                by Elaine Pinderhughes, M.S.W.

    Marlene Watson, who will be our 2009 recipient of the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Social Justice became an advocate for social justice very early in her life.
     Although her own family was poor, at Xmas Marlene insisted on leaving  money for Santa to help him buy presents for other poor children.   Again she admonished friends and family members for joining the cowboys in a movie western in ridiculing and making derogatory statements against the Indians who had made them drunk. . Throughout her life she has been an individual who despite personal sacrifice and attack has been willing to stand unmoved against injustice and to sometimes be the lone voice for change.   
    As chair of  the Couple and Family Therapy Department at Drexel  University Marlene has been a visionary and a trailblazer, transforming the Couple and Family Therapy Department at Drexel University into an efficient, effective racially diverse faculty and student body in order to increase the pool of culturally competent and minority professionals needed to address the cultural chasm that consumers face in accessing mental health.  Recognized as one of ten  “cultural healers” and innovative therapists by The Utne Reader for her remarkable work with substance dependent prison inmates and their families, and, finding herself to be the lone advocate for mental health at a Press Conference during the “Cover the Uninsured Week” in Philadelphia in 2003, she sought and received the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship Award. becoming the first ever couple and family therapist to do so.
True to her personal mandate of holding the door open after walking through, she proudly recruited the second couple and family therapist recipient of this outstanding award.