Treating Adolescents with Family-Based Mindfulness

by Joan Swart, Christopher K. Bass, Jack A. Apsche

A new take on therapeutic mindfulness with specific applications to troubled and delinquent youth is the focus of this innovative text. It introduces Family Mode Deactivation Therapy (FMDT) and its core concepts and methodologies, differentiating it from other cognitive and mindfulness therapies for adolescents with problem behaviors and comorbid conditions. Step by step applications of FMDT from case conceptualization to assessment and treatment are featured, with detailed case studies demonstrating its effectiveness in treating mood disorders, aggressive behavior and trauma and guidelines for its use with abusive families and other complex cases. The book’s depth of clinical detail and appendix of therapist tools make it especially practical.

Included in the coverage:

• A comparison of MDT with other cognitive approaches.
• The empirical status of MDT.
• Mindfulness in MDT process, and in the treatment room.
• FMDT and sexual offender youth.
• MDT and mindfulness in the context of trauma.
• Treating the “untreatable”: FMDT and challenging populations.

While Treating Adolescents with Family-Based Mindfulness is immediately useful to practicing psychotherapists, it should also be of interest to other professionals with a role in adolescent health care, such as policymakers, social workers, supervisors, juvenile corrections and youth center personnel and students and researchers.

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