This group will receive treatment as usual within the family unit

This group will receive an EFST stand alone treatment consisting of a two days EFST course and 6 individual parental guidance sessions

EFST extended intervention is a stand-alone treatment that consist of a two days EFST group course followed by six weekly individual sessions of parental guidance by a licensed EFST therapist. The treatment is given indirectly to the child through work with the parent, thus it might remove or diminish the pressure on the children that suffer from mental health problems to solve their disorder themselves. In this condition a total of 19 hours of EFST treatment is provided.

To establish and measure change in childrens symptoms and diagnosis of mental distress, our main outcome measure will be the semi-structured diagnostic interview Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, present and lifetime version (Kiddie-SADS-PL), DSM-IV version (Kaufman, 1997). the Kiddie-sads will be completed at randomization and then repeated after 3 months to investigate the presence of diagnosis. A diagnosis will be rated as present or not present, with the threshold for presence being defined as a score of at least 3 within each diagnosis.

To measure change in childrens symptoms of mental distress, the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, SDQ (Goodman et al., 2000) will be used. The child will be filling it out him/herself electronically (from 11 yeas of age), as well as the parents and teacher. The SDQ consists of 25 items describing positive and negative attributes of children and adolescents that can be allocated to 5 subscales. Each item has to be scored on a 3-point scale with 0 = 'not true', 1 = 'somewhat true', and 2 = 'certainly true'. A total difficulties score will also be calculated(range 0-40).Lower scores indicates better outcome.

To measure change in self-perceived quality of life, the Health-Related Quality of Life KINDL-R is used (Bullinger et al., 2008). KINDL-R will be filled out by parent and child.The KINDL-R questionnaire comprises 24 items to which the respondents are asked to respond on a 5-point Likert scale (never, seldom, sometimes, often, all the time). The resulting subscales are physical well-being, emotional well-being, self-esteem, family, friends, and everyday functioning (school or nursery school/kindergarten). The subscales of these six dimensions can be combined to produce a total score. Sum scale scores will be calculated by summing up the answer scores (1-5) of each scale. All scales will be transformed so that values range from 0 to 100, with higher values representing better quality of life.