Therapeutic Use of Fact Sheets in Family Therapy with Children and Adolescents With Functional Somatic Symptoms

Psychological Medicine, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, AustraliaFunctional somatic symptoms signal distress and reflect an activation of the body’s stress-regulation systems. Manydifferent types of stressors – physical, emotional or both – may activate the body’s stress-regulation systems. Ifstress-related disruptions are extreme or are not limited in time, functional somatic symptoms may emerge, sig-nalling that the body remains in a state of activation and somatic distress. In this paper, we describe the develop-ment of therapeutic fact sheets, which are used as part of our multimodal, family-based, rehabilitationintervention for children and adolescents presenting with functional somatic symptoms. The fact sheets provideinformation about functional somatic symptoms – including their assessment and treatment – from a stress-sys-tem framework. They are used in the context of a family intervention to facilitate engagement with the familyand to reduce parental anxiety and reactivity. Whilst the fact sheets were initially developed for parents, over timewe found that the sheets were also useful in managing anxiety in the medical and school systems. A key goal ofthis article is to share this resource with other clinicians working with children/adolescents with functional somaticsymptoms.Keywords: fact sheets, functional somatic symptoms, medically unexplained symptoms, parent education, systemanxiety