DR. ALEX PANIO, JR. - ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
The Family Institute of Northwestern University-Chicago--November, 2008
Dr. Alex Panio, Jr., a 1971 graduate of the Family Institute’s two- year post graduate training program in Marital and Family Therapy and past Distinguished Alumnus of The Family Institute has accepted an invitation to teach at Makerere University Medical School in Kampala, Uganda.
Dr. Panio spent six weeks teaching and consulting in Uganda in 2006. He was the first trained family therapist supervisor asked by Health Volunteers Overseas to prepare specialized training in adolescent and family systems medicine for the medical staff, psychiatric residents and clinical psychology students at the University, and Mulago and Butabika Hospitals. The teaching protocol involved live family interviews, supervision and consultation and addressed forensic and social network elements in a family systems model.
On his first day at the University hospital, Dr. Panio saw several adolescent patients die due to severe medical complications in addition to their psychiatric issues. He also found a trend in overmedicated youth with poor diagnostic and systemic work-ups, no therapeutic schedules or milieu. No plan of treatment was developed because the problems were not clearly defined-most patients were diagnosed as psychotic with seizures or possessed and with convulsions.
During his time in Uganda, similar to his teaching experiences at the University of Havana Medical School in Cuba (2001-05), Dr. Panio learned that the practice and rituals of herbal ‘green’ medicines, spiritism, healings and sacrifices have been maintained, often under the guise of more established and formalized institutions. It was evident that family therapy was not considered an integrated component for most aspects of medical and psychological training.
“I was careful not to intrude or be critical of any specific practice/ritual, but to include the code of tradition as part of my process of assessment, to take these beliefs and practices from a hidden to a revealing dimension, by giving these elements a new role in the healing art process,” he says.
When Dr. Panio came to the hospital, his students expected him to treat patients in the same way the staff psychiatrists were doing, which amounted to arriving at a diagnosis to prescribe a combination of medications.
What they got were tutorials that enabled them to consider other opportunities and possibilities-to consider the importance of family system factors in the understanding and management of individual problems. The interface of family, environment and community factors was now a focus. The tutorials were immediately followed by live family interviews with the adolescent, their family and extended community members. The consultations and supervision experiences helped the students turn from the medication focus to incorporate and appreciate the role that the family reflects in the function of the total well-being of a person-the physical, behavioral, spiritual and psychological domains.
Now, two years later with ongoing consultation provided by email exchanges, the University has invited Dr. Panio to return as a visiting professor to help set up the first family therapy focused adolescent clinic in the country. The effort thus far has been to gather journals, tapes, and books as a modest library for staff teaching, learning and interdisciplinary training purposes.
Several of Dr. Panio’s former students still engage in ongoing consultations with him, and have been offered clinical staff positions at the hospital. One student is applying to the Family Institute on recommendation of Dr. Panio for advanced training and would be the first family therapist in Uganda upon completion of his program.
