Family Therapy in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Practice: Integrating Family Therapy in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Practice: An Ethic of Hospitality

This article integrates family therapy in contemporary child and adolescent mental health services as an evidence‐based practice. An integrative practice model is proposed where contextual approaches like systemic and narrative therapy complement and enrich individual problem‐focused models such as biological psychiatry and cognitive therapy. This is based on an ethic of hospitality towards all therapy discourses and the following best practice guideline: ‘To make optimum space for a systemic and narrative understanding contributes to evidence‐based practice in a contemporary mental health service.’ After discussing some dilemmas of integrative practice, I illustrate the therapeutic process by a detailed example of integrative family therapy with a depressed suicidal adolescent.