Revolutionising early intervention outcomes for youth with emerging eating disorders

A revolutionary new perspective is needed to address the gap between treatment need and provision of effective treatments for eating disorders. This will be provided by applying the lessons learned from transdiagnostic interventions for youth mental illness, which have so far excluded eating disorders, to early intervention in eating disorders. My 20+ years of world-leading research expertise in developing and testing new, innovative, and effective interventions that work across different real-world service delivery settings has perfectly equipped me to address this gap. My work on developing new cognitive behaviour therapies (CBTs), which have borrowed across a broad range of effective CBT approaches for various psychological disorders, and my extensive collaborations across many national and international settings, places me in a unique and strong position to do this work. I have developed a 10-session CBT for eating disorders (CBT-T) that produces commensurate effect size improvements to the usual 20-session CBT,11 and a 10-session CBT for perfectionism that has a transdiagnostic impact across perfectionism, disordered eating, depression, and anxiety across different settings, including universal prevention, early intervention, and treatment.12 For the next 5 years I will use the Medical Research Council Framework for developing complex interventions13 to guide a program of transdiagnostic mechanism research focused on developing modular interventions for youth (aged up to 25 years) that can revolutionise early intervention outcomes for youth with emerging eating disorders.