Eating Disorders

Dietary Restraint: Restriction by Another Name?

Andrea

Please excuse me while I nerd out all over your computer screen. I recently turned a corner on my appreciation of the value of quantitative social science, having taken a structural equation modelling class last winter, and today I’m going to share a little of that with you. While I’m still a qualitative researcher through and through, this course taught me that there is great value in understanding how scales are constructed and what that means about how we can interpret results from survey-takers.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with eating disorders? Plenty. A while back, Shiran wrote a post about the issues with the Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire. Her post didn’t focus on the scale psychometrics – that is, how well the scale measures what it is supposed to measure and how consistent it is – but still reveals how questionnaires used to … Continue reading →

“Our Results Are Unexpected, So The Participants Must Have Been in Denial”: Exploring a Worrying Trend in Eating Disorders Research

Shiran 7 Comments

Something I have come across several times when reading ED research studies is a disclaimer that research has been dutifully carried out, but the findings have to be viewed with some scepticism because the participants (and – more specifically – the participants with AN-R) were in denial when completing the self-report questionnaires.

In this post, I will to look at a couple of recent studies that flag-up this issue, to examine what is behind this disclaimer.

The first paper I will explore was published very recently by Gailledrat et al. and touches on body shape concerns in women with eating disorders. Participants were women with a diagnosis of AN or BN selected from a clinic in France. The researchers inform us that, “patients with an ED are much more concerned with their body image and weight than the rest of the population”. The authors do not provide any support for … Continue reading →

Reflections on BEDA Conference 2016

Kristin B 2 Comments

I spent the last weekend of October attending the Binge Eating Disorder Association Conference in San Francisco and it was awesome. I have attended several conferences over the past several years and each and every one fails to be inclusive. The discussion is always centred on the cisgender white straight middle to upper-middle class thin woman who suffers from anorexia. Every research presentation, every session, the same discussion just new material every conference.

Those involved in putting together BEDA this year decided to change the conversation and focus instead on diversity and including all the people that every other conference seems to leave out – and it was wonderful. Obviously I could not attend all of the sessions, so if you want more information check out the #BEDA2016 hashtag on Twitter.

It was clear from the opening session that this conference was going to be a completely different mood. This … Continue reading →

Strategizing for Change: Eating Disorders Association of Canada 2016 Conference

Andrea 8 Comments

Have I mentioned that I go to too many conferences? This week I attended the Eating Disorders Association of Canada (EDAC) conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If you follow me on Twitter, this post might be a bit repetitive, as I seem to think that live-tweeting conferences is my single handed responsibility (that and convincing everyone and their dog to join Twitter). However, I wanted to take the opportunity to provide a bit more context around some of my Tweets and give my overall impressions about the conference and next steps that we might take to move from discussion to action around eating disorders in Canada.

Before getting into the conference, it is worth commenting on the pre-conference session hosted by the National Initiative for Eating Disorders (NIED). In case you don’t know, NIED is a not for profit group founded by Wendy Preskow and Lynne Koss and comprised of professionals … Continue reading →

Psychoeducation for Eating Disorders: Motivational or Distressing?

Andrea 7 Comments

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of primarily psychoeducational interventions for people with eating disorders (EDs). It irks me that the overall theory in implementing this kind of intervention seems to be: if they only knew what they were doing to their bodies, people with EDs would take better care of themselves. Of course I take issue with this idea – if knowing that EDs were harmful to one’s health was enough to make the changes needed to not have an ED anymore, far fewer people would be struggling.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, a psychoeducational program is one that focuses on educating people about a mental illness, including what qualifies as pathology, what the behaviours look like, what the harms are, and what possible interventions exist. To be fair, there are not that many examples of purely psychoeducational interventions for … Continue reading →

What’s Working? Comparing Partial Hospitalization and Residential Treatment for Eating Disorders

Andrea 2 Comments

I can’t help but think I often write more about the issues surrounding the general lack of treatment options for eating disorders that I sometimes neglect to comment on what is available. A part of this is that I would refer to myself as somewhat of a treatment modality atheist – I have the luxury of being someone who does eating disorder research but is not involved in directly treating those with eating disorders, and so I don’t need to specialize in one type of treatment. My bottom line tends to be that no one-size-fits-all, and that the type of treatment that works for someone will depend on so many factors (like their gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, body size, ability, even their politics to a certain extent) that I wouldn’t want to proclaim one type of treatment as king.

In spite of this treatment modality atheism (or perhaps because of … Continue reading →

Where’s the Change? Service User Views on Eating Disorder Services

Andrea 1 Comment

I write a lot about systems-level change for eating disorders, and about how the services that we have available for eating disorders are severely lacking. What I tend to struggle with – though it’s something I’m working on – is how to actually MAKE the changes I’m advocating for. I always fear the tendency to get caught up in saying “this is how things should be,” when I know that eating disorders are so complex and multifaceted and that one size does not fit all when it comes to support. I also fear my experience and my story becoming “the” story about eating disorders and recovery; just because something worked for me does not mean it will work for others.

Surprisingly, despite a general discontent in the ED field with the service continuum, there are few studies that explore what kinds of changes might be made to eating disorder services … Continue reading →

Many Types of Expertise: Recovered Therapists Reflecting on Recovery

Andrea 21 Comments

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of noise in the social media sphere about whether or not those who have recovered from eating disorders should be treating eating disorders. Some have come out on the side of saying definitely not, listing reasons like the potential for bias, countertransference (the therapist making assumptions about clients’ emotions/experiences) or triggering. Others suggest that therapists who have “been there” can empathize with patients in a way that those who have not struggled with food cannot approximate.

Tetyana blogged about the lifetime prevalence of eating disorder professionals in recovery in 2013; she wrote about a 2002 study that revealed that around 33% of women and 2% of men treating eating disorders had a history of an eating disorder themselves. I have also written on the subject before (here); I focused on a 2013 study looking at experiences that recovered clinicians held in common.… Continue reading →

Let’s Talk about Systems Level Change for Eating Disorders

Andrea 7 Comments

This past Wednesday, January 27th, was Bell Let’s Talk day in Canada. In case you’re unfamiliar with the campaign, Bell Canada (a telecom company) donates 5 cents to mental health awareness initiatives for every social media post or text with the hashtag #BellLetsTalk. In general, the campaign has been lauded for its contribution to decreasing shame and stigma around mental illness, which is awesome. There are a number of critics, though, who point out that:

… Continue reading →

Finding What You’re Looking For? Exploring the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire

Shiran 8 Comments

If you’ve ever been assessed for an eating disorder in a clinical setting, there is a good chance you’ve completed the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q). The EDE–Q is a self-report questionnaire widely used in ED assessment and research. Clinicians and researchers calculate several different scores from patient or participant responses to the questionnaire:

  • A score on the global scale, which provides a measure of the severity of ED psychopathology
  • 4 sub-scales: eating restraint, eating concern, weight concern and shape concern

There are a number of cut-off scores that can be used to distinguish between clinically significant and non-significant cases. In this post, I will look at a few papers critiquing the use of the EDE-Q in clinical and research settings.

BACKGROUND

The EDE-Q was originally developed as an assessment tool for bulimia nervosa and binge eating and contains few, if any, questions that specifically assess anorexia nervosa symptomology. … Continue reading →