Treating Trichotillomania

The first and perhaps most important step in writing a treatment manual for use in clinical practice is to clearly explicate the logic of how the treatment, and hence the book, should be organized. Accordingly, our goal in this section is to lay out the structure of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for trichotillomania (TTM) and other body-focused impulse control disorders, clearly explaining critical decisions such as the chosen sequence of techniques or whether a given technique is considered a core component or a module to be used in some but not all cases. The structure of this particular book is influenced by the work of experts who have gone before us in pioneering CBT for TTM, and is also informed by over a decade of our own clinical work and research on TTM across the developmental spectrum. We are indebted to those who developed this approach to treatment and also to those who built the extant literature on the psychopathology of TTM and related disorders. These clinicians and researchers did so in order to help alle- ate the suffering of those afflicted with these conditions, and we endeavor to f- low in their footsteps in continuing this important work.