CBT with young people and families

A number of studies of CBT with young people have been carried out. One of the earliest controlled studies demonstrated that CBT was as effective as clomipramine for the control of the symptoms of OCD (de Haan et al., 1998). Subsequent studies have compared CBT with waiting list controls (Bolton and Perrin, 2008), with sertraline (Asbahr et al., 2005; March et al., 2004) and have delivered CBT in family (Barrett et al., 2004) or group formats (Asbahr et al., 2005). All of the CBT programmes have produced similar improvements in measures of OCD. Nevertheless, there are differences between the approaches adopted. Most forms of CBT have focused on encouraging the young person to manage the anxiety or discomfort associated with ERP (e.g. see March and Mulle, 1998). In this book we describe a different approach which encourages the young person to find out for themselves how their thinking is the problem rather than their behaviour and draws on the developments made in the adult field. There are no direct comparisons of this approach with others.