A pragmatic randomised multi-centre trial of multifamily and single family therapy for adolescent anorexia nervosa

Various labels have been used for eating disorder focussed family therapy including Maudsley Family Therapy, Maudsley Model Therapy and in recent years most commonly Family Based Treatment or FBT. We have argued [19] that such terms are misleading because they imply a theoretically distinct model of treatment rather than a treatment with a shared theoretical frame with other systemic therapies but with a specific focus on treating an eating disorder (very much in the way that “anxiety focussed CBT” or “trauma focussed CBT” are both forms of CBT). The term FBT is also ambiguous because it is sometimes used just to refer to treatments using a specific treatment manual [63] and sometimes to all studies using an eating disorders focussed family therapy. Our use of the term FT-AN emphasizes that this is a treatment that draws on family systems theory and uses a broad range of family therapy intervention techniques while its specificity derives from its focus on treating an eating disorder [64].

While most adolescent studies have used 18 years as their upper age limit we decided to include a broader age range for two main reasons. First, 18 years is an arbitrary boundary that reflects some changes in a young person’s legal status but certainly does not reflect either a social or biological maturational boundary between adolescence and adulthood. Second, there is increasing recognition that transitions between adolescent and adult services need to be more flexible and we therefore wanted to make sure that our findings would be applicable beyond the narrowly defined boundary between services.