Treatment & Recovery

Should Insurance Companies Cover Residential Treatment for Eating Disorders?

Tetyana 48 Comments

Should insurance companies cover residential treatment for eating disorders?  The price tag is high, about $1,000/day on average, but evidence of treatment effectiveness  is astonishingly low. Practically nil, as I’ve recently discovered. Despite spending my free time punching away different keywords into the PubMed search bar, I came up with very little. And you know what I think? I think treatment centers should be embarrassed. And I think, wow, maybe insurance companies have a point? (A scary thought! I don’t actually think they do, though – but then, I just can’t wrap my head around for-profit healthcare, having lived all my life with socialized healthcare, and loving it.)

Carrie over at ED-Bites recently blogged about the fact that there a dearth of evidence-based treatment for eating disorders. It is a complicated issue, I know, but I do think that any organization or center that offers treatment (especially … Continue reading →

What’s it Like to be a Man with an Eating Disorder?

Tetyana 4 Comments

What is it like for men to live with an eating disorder? What is it like for men to seek and receive treatment for an eating disorder? These are the questions that Kate Robinson and colleagues asked a group of eight men who were receiving treatment (inpatient, day patient or outpatient) at two ED treatment centers in the UK. Their goal was to find out if and how men’s experiences with an eating disorder differ from women with eating disorders.

Men account for roughly 10% of eating disorder patients (when considering anorexia and bulimia, not including binge eating disorder, which is not yet part of the DSM). I suspect this number is actually higher – as less men probably realize they have an ED, admit to having an ED or seek treatment, precisely due to the issues raised in this article (and others). Given that men form a sizeable minority … Continue reading →

The Research-Practice Gap in Eating Disorder Treatment

Tetyana

The approaches used in clinical practice to treat patients often lag behind the most up-to-date developments in research. It can take a long time to integrate scientific findings into clinical practice. This, of course, is not limited to eating disorders or even mental health issues. This so-called “science-practice gap” exists for many reasons, which vary depending on the medical discipline.

This issue, though, seems particularly bad when it comes to eating disorder treatment.

There’s the issue of conducting good studies – how do we determine what is efficacious? That’s a complicated task. What is “recovery” and how long is long-enough for follow-up? Is what we consider to be efficacious really efficacious or just slightly better than the rest?

Then there’s the training: mental health seems to be undervalued in medical school curricula for one, but even more importantly: “Clinicians tend to give more weight to their personal experiences than to … Continue reading →

Who Gets Treatment? Your Ethnicity Matters

Saren 9 Comments

In 2010, I wrote a literature review on eating disorders in women of color in North America. I expected to find only a few articles on this subject – every lecture in my undergrad psychology classes, every piece of information targeted to the public, every discussion I had, it seemed, either omitted the existence of EDs in non-stereotypical (white, female, heterosexual, adolescent, upper/middle-class) populations altogether – or glossed over it with a footnote on “acculturation” that reductively attributed the disorder to a misguided desire to fit into the dominant culture, much as other women might aspire to look like the images of female bodies in mass media. (Acculturative stress is actually far more complex than this, and furthermore is not necessarily the sole or even the primary cause of EDs for all people of color.)

[Some people] think that I hate being Asian and want to look white, which

… Continue reading →

When Clinicians Do More Harm Than Good (Attitudes Toward Patients with Eating Disorders)

Tetyana 33 Comments

I was going to blog more about mortality rates in eating disorder patients, but recent ED-related deaths have left a bitter taste in my mouth (huge understatement). So, I’ve decided instead to write about a paper requested by the founder of The Joy Project on clinician reactions to patients with eating disorders by Thomspon-Brenner and colleagues that came out this year.

If you have an eating disorder or are close to someone with an eating disorder, you’ve likely heard many stories about dismissive or down-right negative and harmful attitudes that clinicians often have toward patients with EDs.

I’ve experienced it myself: I had to find another doctor to refer me to an outpatient clinic, because the first one didn’t – he didn’t think I needed help (probably because I was very aware that things were not heading in the right direction even before I was at a low weight). Needless … Continue reading →