Mentalization in eating disorders: a preliminary trial comparing mentalization-based treatment (MBT) with a psychodynamic-oriented treatment

Mentalization‐based treatment and its evidence‐base status: A systematic literature review

“…Balestrieri et al . () described the results of the first MBT‐matched control study ( N = 24) for eating disorders (MBT‐ED). The paper compared the effectiveness of an 18‐month manualized MBT‐ED with a psychodynamic intervention indicated that all psychiatric symptoms were reduced significantly in both groups and the only significant between‐group effects emerged in the GAF scores, which favoured the MBT group.…”

“…Similarly, the development of a new protocol of MBT for eating disorders (MBT‐ED) yielded positive results (Balestrieri et al ., ; Robinson et al ., ). In the trial of Robinson et al .…”

“…Furthermore, MBT for eating disorders accumulated evidence from stages two and three. This indicates that MBT treatment of BPD, eating disorders, and children and adolescents has accumulated evidence from highly controlled settings (Bateman & Fonagy, , , ; Jørgensen et al ., ; Robinson et al ., ; Rossouw & Fonagy, ), practice‐based settings (Bales et al ., , 2014; Balestrieri et al ., ; Kvarstein et al ., ), and large service evaluations (Bales et al ., ). On the contrary, studies on MBT treatment of depression and parental interventions failed to progress through the three stages of the model and only provided evidence from the second stage with studies in highly controlled settings.…”

“…According to the Thompson Reuter search tool of Web of Science, the use of the term ‘mentalization’ increased from 7 to 844 between 1991 and 2017 (Web of Science, ). Clinicians have incorporated MBT as an intervention for a wide range of clinical presentations (Bateman & Krawitz, ) such as eating disorders (Balestrieri, Zuanon, Pellizzari, Zappoli‐Thyrion, & Ciano, ; Robinson et al ., ), depression (Jakobsen et al ., ), and self‐harm (Rossouw & Fonagy, ) among others. MBT has been implemented in different countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands (Bales et al ., ; Jakobsen et al ., ; Jørgensen et al ., ) and is recommended in the Australian Clinical Practice guidelines (National Health and Medical Research Council, ) for the treatment and management of BPD.…”

Childhood behavioral inhibition is associated with impaired mentalizing in adolescence

“…Deficiencies in complex mental state reasoning and in simple mindreading have been found, respectively, in adolescents and children with psychopathic symptoms [ 24 – 28 ], and the tendency to attribute excessive or unrealistic mental states has been described in borderline personality disorder [ 12 , 29 – 32 ]. In addition, recent studies showed that problems in MZ are also present in depression [ 33 ], anxiety [ 34 , 35 ], trauma-related disorders [ 36 ], eating disorders [ 37 ], attachment-related problems [ 11 , 38 ] and addictions [ 39 , 40 ]. Thus, problems in MZ capacity are present in several psychopathological conditions.…”