Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research Award:
William R. McFarlane

Chris Beels

Bill McFarlane's distinction as a researcher is directly connected to his equal distinction as a family therapist and public psychiatrist-administrator. He has spent his career trying to find solutions to the practical problems that arose in his work with families of the severely and persistently mentally ill, and building institutions where those solutions can be tested and taught.

As a medical student and resident he worked with Peter Laqueur at Vermont State Hospital, and learned from that experience, the earliest in the field, the effectiveness of the multi-family group in the long-term problems of schizophrenia. This broadly social approach to a neuropsychological problem has been the core around which Bill built his research career. By concentrating powerfully on this area, and by extending his work on it systematically, he built a campaign against one of our principal mental health problems step-by-step. At a conference he organized at Columbia in 1981, Bill combined his own experience with that of Anderson, Hogarty, Falloon and Leff and set the terms for the discussion of the family therapy of schizophrenia in the coming decade. He edited the proceedings of the conference in the book, Family Therapy in Schizophrenia (1983) that became a textbook for that subject.

Then, from his strategic position as head of both the Biosocial Treatment Research Division at the Psychiatric Institute and the Training Program in Family Psychoeducation for New York State, he put together a large-scale statewide organization that would simultaneously teach the technique and test the unresolved questions in this area. Questions of the indications and pitfalls were addressed, and multifamily group work, compared with single-family work, proved to be the preferred, as well as the more economical and efficient form of therapy.

McFarlane's New York group extended this training program in the states of Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington. In this, they wrestled with the researcher's ultimate professional problem: dissemination. They tested ways of combining the treatment with work and advocacy programs, and showed that coordinating family work with other essentials of community treatment resulted in fewer relapses, and better social and work experience. They applied the multi-family group approach to bipolar disorder as well, and demonstrated its effectiveness. Much of this work is described in Multifamily Groups in the Treatment of Severe Psychiatric Disorders, published last year.

Bill went to Portland, Maine in 1992 to be Professor at the University of Vermont and Chief of Psychiatry at Maine Medical Center. While continuing and extending his previous work, he started his most recent adventure in combining treatment, public policy and research: the early identification and intervention with early symptoms of schizophrenia. Based on British and Scandinavian models, this classic public health move from treatment to prevention involves the collaboration of schools, teachers, parents and the community. It caps a career of outstanding achievement by a researcher who understood not only how to ask the right questions, but also how to bear the burden of leadership without which no one listens to the answers.