This comprehensive, interdisciplinary guidebook is designed for the mental health practitioner seeking to utilize proven and effective interventions with children and adolescents suffering from significant anxiety and phobic disorders. Each chapter is co-authored by a clinical child psychologist and a child psychiatrist, the basis of the volume's unique and balanced perspective. In addition, each chapter presents state-of-the-art assessment and treatment strategies for a panoply of phobic and anxiety disorders, including both psychosocial and pharmacological interventions. Moreover, the volume addresses important conceptual, epidemiological, and ethical issues in working with children and adolescents. All in all, this guide will help address the wide chasm between clinical research and clinical practice, uniting the forces intrinsic to child psychiatry and clinical child psychology.

Anxiety disorders are common, cause considerable morbidity and perhaps mortality, and (most important) are now treatable with evidencebased treatment procedures. This book is designed to help clinicians from a variety of disciplines learn about the etiology, developmental course, assessment, and treatment of children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. Thus, clinicians and their patients are the primary targets for this book.

In the past, psychology and psychiatry have been at odds over these issues—sometimes for scientific reasons and at other times because stakeholder issues were paramount. The editors and chapter authors of this book believe strongly that it is not possible to practice competent and ethical psychopharmacology without the availability of empirically supported psychotherapy. Similarly, it is not possible to practice competent and ethical psychotherapy without the availability of empirically supported psychopharmacology. We believe that physicians (who typically write prescriptions) and psychologists (who, for the most part, have developed and are better versed in psychological treatments) must join hands in the care of individual patients, if for no other reason than that the complexity of modern mental health care is beyond the capacity of any one individual to master.

In this context, this book intentionally models both the benefits and the difficulties of multidisciplinary practice in which practitioners of both disciplines become stakeholders for the experiment (the research question) or the benefit of the individual patient (the clinical question). Without this commitment to multidisciplinary practice, we shortchange our patients.