Connecting body and mind: the first interview with somatising patients and their families

In this article we outline the framework our consultation-liaison team has developed for interviewing families whose children present with medically unexplained symptoms. The framework was developed over many years in the context of our work with a large number of families, who collectively taught us to be more sensitive with regard to the experience of such families in the medical system, and who reacted strongly when we moved prematurely to the use of psychological language or to questions about family relationships or emotional functioning. Throughout the interview we maintain a focus on the body: the family history of illness and, in particular, the story of the child's symptoms. We take a detailed, temporally ordered history of the symptom and ask for collateral information - family illness, family life events, events at school, family emotional responses - all in relation to the story of the symptoms. In the assessment interview and in our work in general, we focus on the body. We move very carefully and very slowly from the physical to the psychological, from talking about the body to talking about relationships and about the mind.