[Psychotherapy in children and youths]

Child and adolescent psychotherapy form a large proportion of the total amount of psychotherapeutic efforts. Because of the age of the patients, the positive or negative impact is considerable. From the literature we learn that the efforts made to evaluate psychotherapy effects are not in balance with the amount of executed therapies. Meta-analyses of the available controlled therapy-evaluation studies offer a limited but rather encouraging view on the effectiveness of child and adolescent psychotherapy. Also on the differences in effectiveness according to the therapeutic orientation or the treated disturbance some interesting conclusions can be drawn. Unfortunately, these conclusions are based on a limited number of studies, because few clinicians conduct systematic research on therapy effectiveness. Systematic therapy evaluation requires some explicit decisions. The clinician has to decide on the description of the disturbance and the use of a diagnostic system, on the choice of standardized assessment procedures, on the operationalization of his therapeutic techniques and on the availability of norm groups and/or appropriate control conditions. In our psychology and psychotherapy training programs, attention for therapy evaluation is rather limited. Only a small number of students or trainees is explicitly trained in this aspect of therapeutic work. The available literature offers some interesting suggestions to enhance the quantity and the quality of the research in this area.