["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.