Until relatively recently the evidence base has seemed to play little part in the planning of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Treatments offered to children and families attending many services have therefore been determined as much by the background and interests of the professionals running the service as by the needs of the child. Planning guidance for the purchasers and providers of CAMHS has also tended to eschew the evidence base, placing more emphasis on features like accessibility and comprehensiveness. As a result, in some areas it is possible that families have had easy access to comprehensive services that are at best ineffective or at worst harmful.

Empirically supported interventions have not thus far been widely used by CAMHS for many reasons. One of the most important is the assumption that the evidence base is too thin to allow rational choices about which treatments a service should offer. This book, along with other recent reviews, shows that the evidence base for psychological treatments is in fact larger and stronger than is often believed. In the book, Alan Carr and nine other psychologists present a review of the literature from 1977 to 1997. Many clinical problems are covered, including child abuse, elimination disorders, hyperkinesis, behavioural problems, substance misuse, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and pain. Within each domain the main psychological treatments are described and their evidence base is tabulated. The methodological features of the key empirical studies are described and their results displayed as effect sizes. Each chapter concludes with a summary of the evidence and with helpful lists of references to training manuals and self-help guides for parents and children.

What Works with Children and Adolescents is a very useful and comprehensive introduction to the empirical basis for the psychological treatment of child and adolescent mental health disorders. Any book that is as ambitious as this will inevitably have some problems. There were technical difficulties with the review: for example, the authors did not find every relevant study and they sometimes missed important methodological problems in those studies that they did identify (such as inadequate randomisation procedures). Moreover, the field is moving fast at the moment, so that some of their conclusions have been overtaken by the findings from more recent studies. Nevertheless, this is a helpful contribution that would make a useful addition to the departmental library.