Socially excluded youth with mental health problems and co-occurring difficulties (e.g. conduct disorder, family breakdown, homelessness, substance use, exploitation, educational failure) attract the involvement of multiple agencies. Poorly coordinated interventions often multiply in the face of such problems, so that a young person or family is approached by multiple workers from different agencies working towards different goals and using different treatment models; these are often overwhelming and may actually be experienced as aversive by the young person or their family. Failure to provide effective help is costly throughout life This is the first book to describe Adaptive Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment (AMBIT). This is an approach to working with people - particularly young people and young adults - whose lives are often chaotic and risky, and whose problems are not limited to one domain. In addition to mental health problems, they may have problems with care arrangements, education or employment, exploitation, substance misuse, offending behaviours, and gang affiliations; if these problems are all occurring simultaneously, any progress in one area is easily undermined by harms still occurring in another. AMBIT has been designed by and for community teams from Mental Health, Social Care, Youth work, or that may be purposefully multi-disciplinary/multi-agency. It emphasises the need to strengthen integration in the complex networks that tend to gather around such clients, minimising the likelihood of an experience of care that is aversive. AMBIT uses well evidenced 'Mentalization-based' approaches, that are at their core integrative - drawing on recent advances in neuroscience, psycho-analytic, social cognitive, and systemic "treatment models".

Meeting the complex needs of some of the most vulnerable populations in our society often involves the need for connected networks of care providing health, social care, educational and voluntary sector services. This presents major challenges for both clients and practitioners for this to work well. Adaptive mentalization based integrative treatment (AMBIT) has been developed over the last 15 years to address the needs of both clients and practitioners in trying to make this work well. The basic framework for AMBIT was set out by the authors in AMBIT: A Guide for Teams to Develop Systems of Care in 2017 but continues to evolve through collaboration with practitioners across the world who work with people (both young people and adults) for whom many current services are not experienced as helpful. AMBIT for People with Multiple Needs: Applications in Practice describes the progress of this collaboration and shows how AMBIT has been applied in health, social care and education settings across the world. Contributors convey the detail of what it is like to apply AMBIT to their work by combining case illustrations with detailed descriptions of therapeutic practice and technique, along with inspiring and remarkable stories of therapeutic change. The chapters examine therapeutic casework in very different services providing community and residential based care with adults and young people across Europe and the UK. With AMBIT constantly evolving, the book explores recent developments in the AMBIT model and provides rich new thinking about how "helping" services can be supported to provide meaningful help and change.

This timely book uniquely addresses the application of CBT to children and young people within health, school and community contexts. With the recent expansion of increasing access to psychological therapies (IAPT) CBT is increasingly applied to work with children outside the traditional therapy clinic. This book provides accessible knowledge and practice skills for professional staff working with troubled children and young people in real-world settings. Taking into consideration complex difficulties that do not always fit fixed length treatments, the authors take a much-needed realistic approach to applying CBT to childhood problems. This is relevant and accessible reading for a wide range of specialist child trainees and practitioners, including new IAPT therapists, counsellors, nurses, teachers and social workers. Peter Fuggle, Sandra Dunsmuir & Vicki Curry are co-Directors of the UCL accredited Certificate, Diploma & Masters course on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and other outcomes based interventions (CBTOBI) delivered at the Anna Freud Centre in London.