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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Treating Alzheimer's Disease Through Caregiver Family Therapy, Dr. Sara Honn Qualls demonstrates her approach to helping families care for loved ones with Alzheimer's disease. Caregiver Family Therapy (CFT) assists families with recognizing, interpreting, and taking action to address symptoms of growing cognitive impairment while continuing to meet the needs of multiple family members.
In this session, Dr. Qualls works with a young African American woman named Michelle who is married with a family. Her mother, who lives with the client's disabled sister, is becoming less and less able to take care of herself. The night before the session, her mother called 911 to accuse Michelle's sister of abuse. This false accusation is seen as a harbinger of changes that will need to be made in Michelle's sister's living arrangement because of her mother's decline.
In the session, Michelle begins to realize that her caregiving is having a negative impact on her family and marriage. Dr. Qualls helps Michelle to explore restructuring the family and to develop a list of tasks that need to be accomplished to protect the well-being of her mother, sister, and herself and her family.
CFT helps families alter decision-making processes and relationship structures in later life to accommodate age-related declines in physical and cognitive capacities of a previously autonomous family member. As older adults experience cognitive declines, such as those produced by Alzheimer's disease, other family members must alter their previous roles to compensate for the lost capacities in a member.
Read more about the approach
is professor and director of clinical training in the psychology department at the University of Colorado (CU) at Colorado Springs, where she also serves as director of the Gerontology Center. She is a practicing clinical psychologist who helped establish the CU Aging Center, a community-based geriatric mental health clinic, and the new clinical geropsychology doctoral program that opened in fall 2004.
She has published two books, Psychology and the Aging Revolution (American Psychological Association, 2000) and Aging and Mental Health (1998). Her research and writing focus on marital and family development in later life and clinical interventions for later life couples and families.
She directs the Caregiving Family Therapy team for the CU Aging Center and is chair of the Aging Initiative for the CU-Colorado Springs, a plan to enhance the capacity of the university to improve the experience of aging for all of us.
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