Identified patient, or "IP", is a term used in a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been unconsciously selected to act out the family's inner conflicts as a diversion. This person, often a child, is "the split-off carrier of a breakdown in the entire family system," which may be a transgenerational disturbance or trauma.
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The term is also used in the context of organizational management, in circumstances where an individual becomes the carrier of a group problem.
Origins and characteristics
The term emerged from the work of the Bateson Project on family homeostasis, as a way of identifying a largely unconscious pattern of behavior whereby an excess of painful feelings in a family lead to one member being identified as the cause of all the difficulties – a scapegoating of the IP.
The identified patient – also called the "symptom-bearer" or "presenting problem" – may display unexplainable emotional or physical symptoms, and is often the first person to seek help, perhaps at the request of the family. However, while family members will typically express concern over the IP's problems, they may instinctively react to any improvement on the identified patient's part by attempting to reinstate the status quo.
Virginia Satir viewed the identified patient as a way of both concealing and revealing a family's secret agendas. Conjoint family therapy stressed accordingly the importance in group therapy of bringing not only the identified patient but the extended family in which their problems arose into the therapy – with the ultimate goal of relieving the IP of the broader family feelings he or she has been carrying. In such circumstances, not only the IP but their siblings as well may end up feeling the benefits.
R. D. Laing saw the IP as a function of the family nexus: "the person who gets diagnosed is part of a wider network of extremely disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication." Later formulations suggest that the patient may be an "emissary" of sorts from the family to the wider world, in an implicit familial call for help, as with the reading of juvenile delinquency as a coded cry for help by a child on his parents' behalf. There may then be an element of altruism in the IP's behavior – 'playing' sick to prevent worse things happening in the family, such as a total family breakdown.
Examples
Criticism
Extending the original concept of the identified patient, the anti-psychiatry movement went on to argue that it was the family that was mad, rather than the individual the family had identified as 'sick' – positing also that the latter might in fact be the least disturbed member of the family nexus.