["Helping ourselves": the Ludwigshafen multi-family training].

Eia Asen developed multi-family-therapy (MFT) in the context of pediatric psychiatric work with predominantly poor and marginalised families from very different cultural, religious, linguistic, and social traditions in inner-city London. This work began with families affected by globalisation, migration, segregation, criminality, and other adverse social and economic effects of Thatcherism. Asen replaced the expert-led diagnostics, patterns of illness and individual medical indication of the case-by-case based model of treatment with a systemic practice developed across decades together with a large multi-professional and multicultural team, which places the family, the social, economic, and educational contexts, as well as traditions and the every-day situations of children and their parents, at the centre of the support.

[Systemic approach in therapy and counselling with adolescents].

To work with adolescents and their contexts usually means to face certain problems: Parents or teacher want the adolescent to do a counselling or a therapy, the adolescent is not motivated or does not have much of an idea what this means. The problem often causes conflicts between the adolescent and the persons of his context. Typical conflict communication develops that blocks good solution-finding and constructive developments and usually is re-enacted in the therapeutic or counselling session.