Families Affected by Addiction

This Open Access book sheds new light on the wide range of Affected Family Members' experiences. At a conservative estimate, there are at least 100 million adults across the globe who are affected by their relatives’ addiction problems.  These Affected Family Members (AFMs) experience multiple stresses, coping dilemmas, and a lack of information and support, and are at heightened risk for ill-health.  The results are very costly, both from the personal and from the public services point of view. 

The volume elaborates on the barriers to providing effective help, including political neglect, under-representation in both policy and service delivery models, the lack of involvement and encouragement from health and social care professionals, the stigmatisation and bias as barriers to care, and the range of evidence-based interventions. It also explores the similarities and differences of all of these areas depending on the type of addiction problem that the family is affected by – alcohol, illicit drugs, gambling, etc.  

While covering the more commonly reported work in high-income countries, the contributions put strong emphasis on the experience of AFMs in low- and middle-income countries. Given its truly global approach, the book will be a key resource for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers alike.

Gallus Bischof is a lecturer and senior researcher at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Lübeck, Germany, active in addiction research since 1998. His research interests cover addictive disorders and the family, early identification and intervention for problematic substance use. He is also Chair of trustees of the Addiction and the Family International Network (AFINet), and President of the German Society for Addiction Psychology. He serves as an Editor for BMC Family Practice, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors and Suchttherapie (“Addiction Therapy”).

Richard Velleman is Emeritus Professor of Mental Health Research, University of Bath, Bath, UK and co-Director of the Addictions and related Research Group (ARG) at Sangath, Goa, India. He has been active in addictions research since 1977. His research interests include addiction and the family, resilience, developing and implementing therapeutic interventions for affected family members, and developing and researching new ways of delivering psychological interventions to people (and their families) with mental health or addiction problems within low or middle income countries. He is a founding member and current treasurer of the Addiction and the Family International Network (AFINet). He has been awarded grants of more than £10,500,000 over his research career to date, and has more than 300 publications including fifteen books, more than 180 published refereed academic papers and scholarly chapters, and more than 25 major Reports.

Jim Orford is an Emeritus Professor of Clinical & Community Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK. He has been a contributor to research and theory since the 1960s. His main areas of interest include the nature of addiction and its treatment (holder of the Jellinek award for work in that area), with a special focus on gambling disorder, community psychology, the psychology of war and militarism, the psychology of economic inequality, and particularly the impact on the family of substances and products that are dangerous to health and potentially addictive. The latter was the subject of his PhD in the 1970s and has been a career-long focus of much of his work since then. He is a founding member and Trustee of the charity Addiction and the Family International Network (AFINet). Has published in over 50 different peer-reviewed journals and has written 15 book and edited other volumes.

Abhijit Nadkarni is NIHR Professor of Global Health Research at the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK. His research interests encompass global mental health, and particularly alcohol use disorders. A lot of his work is based out of Sangath, a research NGO in Goa, India where he started and co-leads the Addictions Research Group. He has been actively involved in the capacity building of mental health researchers and lay health workers. He is Director of the Leadership in Mental Health course, Sangath; and taught on the same course hosted in Egypt by the World Health Organisation-Eastern Mediterranean Region Office; and for the Pacific Island Nations in Australia. Over the years, he has trained and supervised lay health workers in community-based mental health care in several parts of India, Chitwan and Kathmandu in Nepal, and in Kenya.

Marcela Tiburcio Trained in addiction psychology, Head of the Department of Social Sciences in Health of the Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz, National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City; member of the National System of Researchers level 2. Professor of the postgraduate programin Psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has worked in the field of substance use for more than 25 years, the topics of interest are: a) family mental health in urban and indigenous population, b) development, evaluation and implementation of brief interventions and, c) the use technology for substance use care. Member of AFINet, representative of INEBRIA Latina (2013-2023). Associate Editor of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction; Digital Mental Health Section in Frontiers in Psychiatry and Frontiers in Digital Health.