Living alongside someone’s mental illness or addiction is its own hardship. Families watch, worry, argue, pay, cover, hope, and grieve, often for years, and mostly without help. You also need support, not just the person who is unwell.

The family support programme

The programme combines family therapy with psycho-education. Therapy gives the family a place to say difficult things with a professional in the room and to repair strained relationships. Psycho-education explains the condition itself: what it does, what recovery realistically looks like, which reactions help, and which ones — however well-meant — tend to make things worse.

For families of clients in residential care, family sessions are arranged as and when needed, in person at Kyambogo or Bujjuko or virtually, alongside the monthly Family Support Programme Day described below.

The programme is open to families of clients in treatment with us, families of people in recovery, and families whose loved one is not in treatment at all. You do not have to wait for them to be ready before you get help yourself.

The family support group

Families meet other families at our Bujjuko centre in a facilitated group on Family Support Programme Day: the first Saturday of every month, 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, with visiting from 1:00 to 4:00 pm the same day. People who have lived with the same problem for years exchange what actually helped. The group also connects members to other resources, such as Al-Anon.

If your person refuses help

This is one of the most common and painful situations families bring to us, and it has its own page: When a loved one refuses help. The short version: no family has found a reliable way to force an adult into recovery, and pressure can harden refusal. Support for you is available now, whether or not they ever enter treatment.

What happens when they are in treatment

A question families ask, and a fair one: how involved will you be? The honest answer is that a caregiver’s involvement is critical to recovery, and we encourage clients to have their family as a support system, as involved as possible. What shapes how that happens is confidentiality, which protects what a client shares with the team — it is shared further only with their consent, where the law requires or permits it, or where safety makes it necessary — so the content of their therapy stays between them and their clinicians. What we can do is bring you into family therapy and psycho-education sessions, prepare you for their return home, and support you throughout — worked out with your person as part of their care plan. In practice, family or next of kin are ordinarily part of care planning, and we keep you in touch with general progress and practical arrangements.

To ask about any of this, call +256 770 700944 or write to info@safeplacesuganda.com and mention family support.