Introduction: Anorexia is an eating disorder, manifesting as an excessive obsession with one’s own weight and with the food ingested. Due to a constant feeling that they cannot properly protect they own limits and enforce their needs, adolescent girls establish controll over the only area, which is inaccessible to others – their own body. In doing so, they start to confuse their weight loss with their own value. Along with medical approaches, family therapy, which is focusing on finding the symptoms in the dynamic of domestic relationships (conflicts) and is considering the family together with the adolescent girl as a whole, is increasingly gaining ground in the treatment of anorexia. Therapy includes family dynamics, which due to their unresolved psychic matters create the symptoms for the development of anorexia. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to review literature and identify, how the family and mutual relationships within the family affect the development of anorexia in adolescent girls. The emphasis is on family relationships and the enforcement of family therapy in the treatment. Methods: In the thesis we have used the descriptive work method with systematic literature review. The searching for facts considered the timeframe from the year 2007 until 2017. The search took place in the databases CINAHL, Medline (PubMed), COBIB.SI, Web of Science and in the base of the journal Slovenian Nursing Review. We used freely available literature, which is contextually relevant and topical. Results: Among adolescent girls, anorexia is mostly spread in families with a certain psychopathology. Parents or the entire family play an important role in the development, existence and treatment of anorexia. The majority of authors state that family therapy and the inclusion of the entire family into the treatment process are of primary importance for fast recovery. Before the enforcement of family therapy it is, according to the majority of authors, necessary that the therapist gets thoroughly acquainted with all the family features (hierarchy, race, gender, traditions, habits, mutual relationships etc.), since therapy will only be successful with precise understanding of the family.
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