Evidenced-based Treatments for Children and Adolescents with Eating Disorders: Family Therapy and Family-facilitated Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Abstract

This article summarizes recent research on effective treatments for children and adolescents with eating disorders and illustrates two of the main evidenced based approaches through case descriptions. There are few systematic studies of treatments for children and adolescent eating disorders despite the serious medical and psychological problems attendant to them. One form of family therapy developed at the Maudsley Hospital in London has been the subject of several small to medium sized studies that support the effectiveness of the approach for adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa. The main tenets of the approach include parental empowerment to be active in re-feeding their emaciated children through decreasing parental guilt and anxiety. There are no published controlled trials of any treatment for adolescent Bulimia Nervosa (BN). There are, however, a large number of treatment studies of adults with BN suggesting that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the treatment of choice for the disorders. A case description of the use of a modified form of CBT for adolescent BN is provided.