Review of Cognitive Therapy for Adolescents in School Settings

Författare

Sean Perrin

Summary, in English

This is a detailed guide on the principles of cognitive therapy as they are applied to problems of emotion (anxiety, sadness, anger), skill (assertiveness, problem-solving), and general confidence in children and adolescents. The title is slightly misleading in the sense that there is little in the book that specifically relates to how this treatment would be applied in school settings by school personnel rather than a mental health professional seeing children on a 1-1 basis in an office at a school. Nor do the authors provide evidence of how cognitive therapy has been effectively applied in school settings. A much stronger evidence base exists for the application of cognitive-behavioural approaches that have been implemented by school teachers, pedagogues, and school counsellors (often in group format) as part of universal prevention/treatment programmes for anxiety/depression, as well as the treatment (specifically) of PTSD and Social Anxiety Disorder. Non-clinicians working in a school setting (e.g. teachers) could not pick up this manual and use the techniques here for problems of anxiety/depression/confidence without considerable supervision, and the authors rightly acknowledge this limitation.

Nevertheless this is a very useful book in that it is a detailed account of cognitive therapy as applied to children and adolescents with emotional disorders. In that regard child and adolescent mental health specialists in and outside of school settings are likely to find the book useful. It has case examples, useful diagrams of formulations, and detailed descriptions of particular interventions associated with cognitive therapy (e.g. behavioural experiments, guided discovery). It is not a disorder-specific description of cognitive therapy, and when it comes to disorders like OCD, PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and GAD - clinicians may want to have a manual specific to these conditions.

Avdelning/ar