This book offers a great deal of useful advice for any child and adolescent mental health professional working with children and adolescents who have eating disorders. The chapters progress logically through assessment, engagement, and the principles of treatment including relapse prevention and discharge planning; there is a good review of literature.
Gowers and Green give clear and straightforward clinical advice, with a healthy balance between specific interventions and more general recommendations, as well as useful clinical vignettes. Although the book is written from a cognitive behaviour point of view, it will be very useful to therapists with a wide range of experience and theoretical clinical orientations.
My criticisms are very minor. I had some difficulty at times in sorting out which interventions were aimed at anorexia, which at bulimia and which at eating disorders in general. Additionally, there is relatively little reference to other treatment approaches, particularly the systemic family approaches which, as the authors acknowledge, have the greater, albeit limited, evidence base. Last, the final two chapters on applications and challenges seem to lack cohesion with the other chapters.
I would strongly recommend this book to all child and adolescent mental health professionals working with young people with eating disorders. It provides a wealth of ideas as to how one can work with what is often a very difficult clinical population.
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