Customer Reviews

Treatment Manual for Anorexia Nervosa: A Family-Based Approach

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This is an excellent book for clinicians treating teens struggling with Anorexia. This model taps into the power of the family to successfully fight this horrible disorder. I also highly recommend Help Your Teenager Beat An Eating Disorder, a well-written guide for the clinician and an outstanding resource for parents!!

As a child and adolescent psychiatrist with more than 32 years experience treating anorexia nervosa, it's no exaggeration to assert that the Maudesley Model has finally given us a fighting chance of conquering this devastating disorder. It also happens to be the only approach that has a better track record than non-treatment in randomized controlled trials. Moreover now that a session by session manual is available, it becomes possible for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and mental health workers with a family therapy background to deliver effect treatment to anorexic teenagers and their families - with minimal additional training.

The approach is very prescriptive - from the initial "intense scene" where the therapist informs the parents that their child has a fair chance of dying unless they both take a leave of absence from work to personally supervize all her meals - to the hard and fast rule that all famiy members participate in all sessions until the patient reaches 95% of her ideal body weight. The emphasis that the father attend all sessions is especially important in families (which happens commonly in families with anorexics) where he has somehow become disengaged from the rest of the family.

The focus throughout the initial phase of treatment is empowering the parents to make appropriate food choices for the teenager, until she frees herself from the spell anorexia holds over her. The second session in this highly structured approach always involves a picnic lunch the family brings to the office - enabling the therapist to "coach" the parents regarding their responsibility to get their daughter to eat. This is followed by weekly visits to ensure the family is continuing to provide close supervision of dietary choices, meals, exercise and purging.

According to the authors, restoring appropriate body weight with the Maudesley Model takes 20-30 weeks, at which point the patient enters Phase 2, a transition phase in which she begins to re-take responsibility for her own eating.

After four to six months of transition, the patient enters Phase 3, in which the patient begins work on social issues linked to anorexia, an all-consuming affliction that leads most teenagers to withdraw from normal healthy relationships.

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE

This treatment manual has an amazingly simple structure for such a complex problem. Keeping to the symptoms at hand, starting with what is attainable and streamlining the treatment are key-words in this book. Although purchased at Amazon, it actually is something for the professional setting though. Excellent book, something to recommend to therapists involved in the treatment of AN.

Important new wrinkles on tx. Opens up new possibilities.
Surprisingly for a professional manual, a page-turner.

This is a comprehensive and useful treatment manual both as a guide for those beginning to use this treatment and as revision for those trained in the approach. An excellent buy

The book is good and what I hoped for. I found it to be very clear, very helpfull and very descriptive. I recomend it to mental health professionals.

This book is a must have for therapists who work with adolescents with anorexia and their families. Currently our only evidence based treatment for adolescent AN.

This text is written to assist the clinician with the Maudsley approach. For that reason it is not well suited as a primary source of reference for patients or their families. But, I felt it was an excellent view of the clinical perspective and goals and helped me to understand and better implement the Maudsley method.
My own daughter has anorexia and has made remarkable progress after we committed ourselves to the Maudsley method. I strongly suggest Lock's How to Help Your Teenager Beat An Eating Disorder for any family going through this.

I had heard about the Maudsley Method from an article about Johns Hopkins' Eating Disorder program so I ordered this book along with "Skills-based Learning for Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder." Unfortunately, this book, "Treatment Manual for Anorexia Nervosa: A Familiy-Based Approach" was much less helpful than I thought it would be. It gives a good overview of the conceptual basis for the Maudsley Method, but for the non-professional is not very helpful or informative. That being said, the two books put together make an excellent overview of the program.