Review about Group Therapy in Children and Adolescents with an Eating Disorders

Abstract

Introduction: In recent years, eating disorders are more visible. These are diagnosed better and earlier, and have acquired great relevance in society due to the severity of the psychic symptoms and their comorbidities. These disorders require, in most cases, a long road to recovery, requiring a multimodal treatment approach.

Objective: Review of existing literature for group psychotherapy in adolescents with eating disorders.

Methods: A search is carried out in PubMed, Cochrane, UptoDate and Google Scholar, including the results up to February 2018 (no limit of publication date). The selected languages have been English and Spanish. The key words used were eating disorder (OR anorexia, bulimia, binge) AND adolescence (OR Young) AND group therapy (OR pshychotherapy) and their equivalents in Spanish.

Results: We found five publications for children and adolescents’ population. One is a review of existing treatments and the rest are original articles. Among them, two presented cognitive rehabilitation group therapy with good results in adolescents. Another study with an approach focused on self-esteem and social skills found a marked improvement after therapy. Finally, we found a work based on cognitive behavioral therapy, improving both food symptomatology and associated anxiety and self-esteem problems or interpersonal relationships.

Conclusions: We found demonstrated evidence for group therapy in adults and adolescents with eating disorders, however, the sources are few. It is necessary to continue researching in this field because, despite being frequent in clinical practice, publications are not so many.