Do they cross the bridge when they come to it? Young adult's engagement in attachment-based family therapy as part of inpatient care

Abstract

Although attachment seems to be ‘in fashion’ when it comes to discussing mental health issues, there are few evidence-based therapy models treating attachment issues related to psychopathology. In this paper, we will briefly introduce Attachment-Based Family Therapy (ABFT) as an evidence-based intervention for depressed and suicidal adolescents, and its first-time large-scale application and implementation in a young adult inpatient care unit. We present our clinical data showing that 98% of the young adults who were proposed ABFT engage into this therapy. In our discussion we briefly describe accommodations to the young adult (YA) age and the inpatient setting and discuss hypotheses about which characteristics of young adulthood, the ABFT core interventions and the residential setting play a role in this high engagement. We discuss how adopting a shared clinical attachment-based framework as a team might broaden the impact.