Ethics of Family Assessment: Multigenerational Diagnosis and Treatment Planning

Bring your toughest questions about diagnosing within a family, mapping a genogram, or deciding whose goals drive treatment. Carrington answers participant questions throughout the webinar, so you leave with clarity on the situations that actually show up in your caseload rather than generic guidance.

Work through realistic multigenerational assessment scenarios as a group. Hearing how experienced clinicians reason through competing family perspectives and ethical gray areas builds the clinical judgment that written materials alone cannot teach.

Complete a full 3 CE hours in one focused, structured session. Your live CE certificate is issued after the webinar, giving you a meaningful block of your renewal requirement in a single afternoon.

Counselors frequently assess clients whose presenting concerns are shaped by family history and relationships. This training helps counselors conduct genogram-based multigenerational assessments, decide who the client is when family members attend, and diagnose ethically within a relational picture.

Social workers routinely evaluate clients within their family and community systems. This ASWB ACE-approved webinar provides social workers with tools for multigenerational assessment, ethical diagnosis, and treatment planning that accounts for confidentiality and consent across family members.

Family therapists work directly with the questions at the heart of this webinar: who holds the diagnosis, whose goals guide treatment, and how patterns pass through generations. This training strengthens MFTs' assessment skills and sharpens their ethical reasoning about the identified client and the family as a unit.

Substance use often runs through family systems across generations. This NAADAC-approved webinar helps addiction professionals use genograms to identify multigenerational patterns of use and risk, and to plan treatment ethically when family members are part of both the problem and the support system.

Psychologists conducting assessments, providing therapy, or supervising trainees need a clear framework for gathering family history, forming diagnoses responsibly, and documenting who the client is. This webinar covers evidence-informed assessment approaches and ethical considerations relevant to psychological practice.

Explore how identifying the client shapes everything that follows in family work: confidentiality, consent, diagnosis, documentation, and treatment goals. Learn frameworks for making and revisiting this decision ethically when an individual, a couple, or an entire family is in the room.

Understand how family history and relational patterns influence symptom onset, course, and treatment. Review the theoretical foundations of multigenerational assessment and why looking across generations produces a fuller, more accurate clinical picture than a single-person intake.

Learn the mechanics of constructing a genogram, including standard symbols, relationship lines, and how to capture patterns of illness, substance use, conflict, and support. Practice interpreting a genogram to generate hypotheses rather than to label any single family member.

Address how to attach a diagnosis responsibly when symptoms are embedded in family dynamics. Examine the risks of over-pathologizing, of diagnosing the wrong member, and of allowing one family member's narrative to drive a formal diagnosis, and how to guard against each.

Work through the practical ethics of family assessment: obtaining informed consent from multiple participants, protecting individual confidentiality within a shared process, and documenting the assessment in a way that is accurate, protective, and defensible.

Translate a multigenerational assessment into goals and interventions that respect each family member and the system as a whole. Learn to align treatment planning with the identified client, cultural context, and the family's own priorities.

1. Register. Reserve your spot for the June 9, 2027 webinar. Individual registration is $60 for all 3 CE hours, or attend at no additional cost with an Unlimited Plus membership.

2. Receive your access link. After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with the live webinar link and instructions for joining. A reminder is sent before the event.

3. Attend live. Join on Wednesday, June 9, 2027 from 10:00 AM to 1:15 PM EST. Attendance for the full session is required to earn your 3 live CE hours. Participate in the Q&A and case discussion throughout the session.

4. Complete the post-test and earn your CE certificate. Complete the post-test (required for all live webinars) and course evaluation to receive your 3-hour live CE certificate. Your certificate includes all information required by licensing boards.

Step 1: Clarify Who the Client Is. Before mapping anything, decide and document who the identified client is and how confidentiality, consent, and goals will be handled for everyone who takes part in the assessment.

Step 2: Map the Structure. Chart at least three generations using standard symbols for family members, marriages, partnerships, separations, and children, building the skeleton of the family system.

Step 3: Add Relationships and Patterns. Layer in relational quality, closeness, conflict, and cutoffs, along with patterns of mental health, substance use, illness, and significant life events across generations.

Step 4: Generate Hypotheses, Not Labels. Use the completed genogram to form clinical hypotheses about how patterns are transmitted and maintained, resisting the temptation to pin a single diagnosis on one member prematurely.

Step 5: Diagnose Ethically. Where a diagnosis is warranted, attach it to the appropriate client with attention to relational context, cultural factors, and the risk of pathologizing normal family responses.

Step 6: Plan Treatment for the System. Translate the assessment into goals and interventions that respect each member, align with the identified client, and address the multigenerational patterns the genogram revealed.