Addiction and the family

This was the main topic of my PhD research in the late 1960s and early 70s, and this interest has continued since then, becoming in later years my main area of academic and practical interest. Both the effects on offspring of having had a parent with a drinking problem, and the impact of alcohol, drug and gambling problems upon partners, parents and other relatives and how they cope, have been topics of special interest.

My work has included an international study of family coping in England, Mexico, and indigenous communities in Northern Australia; and later international collaborations in Italy, Ireland. India and Brazil. Other research projects have used the results of those studies to design and test family-based interventions in specialist and primary health care settings.

The Alcohol, Drugs and the Family research interest group I led in the UK, which included colleagues from a number of English Universities and NHS Trusts, developed the stress-strain-coping-support model for understanding the experience of addiction-affected family members (AFMs) and the 5-Step Method (5SM) for counselling AFMs in their own right. The 5SM is now used in several countries including England, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

The Addiction and the Family International Network (AFINet, www.afinetwork.info), which I co-founded in 2012, now has members from more than 50 countries and has held international conferences in England in 2018, and The Netherlands in 2023, with virtual conferences and regular webinars at other times. The next conference is scheduled for Québec, Canada in summer 2025.

Families Affected by Addiction, edited by Gallus Bischof, Richard Velleman, Abhijit Nadkarni, Marcela Tiburcio and Jim Orford, is to be published by Springer Open Access, later in 2024 or early 2025.