Breaking the Silence: A Guide to Help Children with Complicated Grief-Suicide,Homoicide,AIDS,Violence and Abuse Book

For some families of young people with anorexia, I think this approach would be perfect. This is a well researched and clearly formulated intervention with a (relatively) high success rate in this population. I appreciate the role of the parents in spearheading weight restoration, the focus on increasing parenting self-efficacy for parenting an adolescent in general (rather than limiting this to the eating disorder symptoms), the separation of the illness from the adolescent, and the reestablishment of appropriate intergenerational boundaries within the family. This approach supports the whole family, which increases the wellbeing of both the adolescent and the family as a whole.

However, I'm left thinking that of course this isn't going to work for some families. I strongly advocate for parents to be key components in their child/youth's treatment. However, this manual makes the assumption that parents actually have the knowledge, skills, and resources to take on the role of ensuring weight restoration and recovery. I worry that the non-directive coaching approach prescribed to clinicians (which is intended to demonstrate to parents that they already have what they need and know what to do, and that they don't need the clinician to tell them these things) may prevent parents from filling in the gaps in the parents' skills and knowledge. This may make the parents' role considerably more challenging and ineffective than it otherwise needs to be. That said, I tend to work with clients with high comorbidity (rather than just dealing with an eating disorder), which would undoubtably complicate the implementation of this intervention. I am really keen to see more research exploring which client groups benefit most from this intervention, and which clients may be more successful with alternate (e.g., CBT, DBT, or SFT?), integrated (e.g. EFFT?) or supplementary (e.g., MFG?) treatments.