Cognitive–behavioural therapies for children and adolescents

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Abstract
The merging of behaviour and cognitive therapy into cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) occurred in the 1980s in both Europe and North America, partic- ularly on the basis of the successful treatment of panic disorder by Clark (1986) in the UK and Barlow (1988) in the USA. The behavioural emphasis on empiricism with good-quality research design was combined with the cognitive focus on content and meaning. In child and adolescent psychiatry, this process happened rather later but in a similar way, defined by Kendall (1993) thus: "cognitive-behavioural approaches can be defined as a rational amalgam: a purposeful attempt to preserve the demonstrated positive effects of behav- iour therapy within a less doctrinaire context and to incorporate the cognitive activities of the client into the efforts to produce therapeutic change. According- ly, cognitive-behavioural strategies with children and adolescents use enactive, performance-based pro- cedures as well as cognitive interventions to produce changes in thinking, feeling and behaviour." (p. 235) In comparison with CBT for adults, there have been relatively few studies of its use with children, although evidence for effectiveness is steadily mounting.