Skills-based Learning for Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder: The New Maudsley Method. By Janet Treasure, Gráinne Smith & Anna Crane. Routledge. 2007. £12.99 (pb). 228pp. ISBN 9780415431583

The aptly named Treasure and her colleagues have the magpie talent of bringing precious scraps from related fields and fashioning them into accessible and well-researched tools for addressing eating disorders. They borrow motivational enhancement techniques from addictions, skills-training and irreverence from dialectical behaviour therapy, family approaches from child psychotherapy and now the idea of coaching healthy family members in therapeutic techniques, in a manner akin to the Relate manuals, or to Beck's marital self-help Love is Never Enough. ¹

The authors teach a sort of ‘unplugged’ cognitive therapy that informs compassionate living together. Cognitive–behavioural therapy sophisticates will recognise the book's didactic, respectful, empowering, non-blaming style as Socratic. There are examples of Ellis's ‘ABC’ analysis, the encouragement of behavioural experiments, cognitive–behavioural therapy's win-win approach and exploration of alternative ways to speak and think together.

Anorexia often makes people engage in cognitive–behavioural therapy in a purely technical way that comes unhitched from the ‘bigger picture’ unless there is family co-therapy to hold things together. The only robustly evidence-based treatment is ‘Maudsely’ behavioural family work – this book offers families extra ways to contain their own distress and fine-tune their input to the patient's recovery. I already give Janet Treasure's Breaking Free from Anorexia Nervosa ² to all new patients, carers and professionals. I shall now recommend this affordable paperback too – fledgling therapists can also learn much from it.

CD-ROM and web-based versions of this work are being prepared, but don't under-estimate the power of a ‘live’ group setting with peer support, role-play and laughter – the perfect opportunity for professionals and family to learn together. Material that may appear twee and scripts that seem stilted on the page can be translated and re-modelled by the group into tools for effective caring – and for bonding and catharsis.

Inevitably, people remember this book for its menagerie metaphors. What's your caring style? Rhinoceros, kangaroo or – preferably – dolphin? Do you behave like an emotional ostrich, let it all hang out like a jellyfish, or contain your feelings like a helpful St Bernard? As one mother remarked, ‘Give me that keg of brandy!’