2016

Asking the Impossible? Eating Disorder Recovery in Context

Andrea 1 Comment

This past week was Eating Disorder Awareness Week in Canada, which is really like any other week in my world. A week of reminding people that eating disorders don’t only impact young, white, thin, cis, hetero girls, and that when treatment doesn’t work, people aren’t failing – treatment is failing them. A week of calling for systemic changes to support a world where more people’s bodies are made welcome. A week of reminding people that all the research into biochemistry and genetics in the world will not convince people that they need to make space to hear people’s suffering, regardless of its origin (necessary caveat – I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, I’m just saying we need to mobilize research knowledge or it just remains research knowledge and the status quo marches on).

Given that there’s actually a specific ‘reason’ to get on my soap box, I’m emerging from … Continue reading →

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 →

Does Body Dissatisfaction in Children Predict Eating Disorder Symptoms?

Tetyana

Identifying risk factors for eating disorder symptoms may help us develop more evidence-based prevention mentions. Personally not convinced that prevention is really possible with the types of individual-focused programs we have today, I would argue that identifying risk factors may at least help us determine which individuals should be screened in subsequent years. If they do develop eating disorders, they will hopefully be more likely to receive early intervention and treatment.

To identify predictors of eating disorder symptoms, Elizabeth Evans and colleagues (2016) conducted a longitudinal study that measured various putative risk factors at ages 7, 9, and 12 in a group of boys and girls. The authors also wanted to identify correlates of eating disorder symptoms at 12 years of age. They measured eating attitudes and dietary restraint, BMI, body dissatisfaction, and depressive symptoms.

THE STUDY

  • 516 participants; 262 girls and 254 boys
  • all individuals were residents of Gateshead, located
… 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 →

Thinking Critically to Move Forward: Reflections on the International Conference on Eating Disorders 2016

Andrea 9 Comments

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I was at the International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED), the major yearly conference put on by the Academy for Eating Disorders, over the past few days. As I write this post, I am sitting in the San Francisco Airport trying to synthesize my experiences into what may or may not turn into an epic blog post.

Despite my extreme extroversion on the Internet, I actually live in a funny place where I’m continually balancing my innate criticality and training as critical health psychology graduate student with the desire for folks to like me. I see this playing out at conferences like ICED, where people’s opinions of me and my fitness to do this work matter. I am unable to sit in a session and not voice my perspectives on Twitter, but I’m also continually filtering … Continue reading →

Whose Culture is it Anyway? Disentangling Culture and Eating Disorders – Part 6

Andrea 11 Comments

I thought about writing a post about the factor structure of popular eating disorder scales to celebrate my completion of an advanced statistics course in structural equation modelling. When I sat down to read some articles about that, though, I found myself side-tracked– and thoroughly uninterested in deconstructing scale psychometrics. So with a promise to do that at some point, I return to a favourite topic of mine: culture and eating disorders.

When I was writing about culture and eating disorders for the blog last year, I received quite a few requests for articles about eating disorders in developing countries. I suspect that the desire for this kind of article stems from a need to highlight (for the doubters) that eating disorders are serious mental health issues that can impact anyone who is predisposed, regardless of whether they live in a media-saturated landscape or not. As I noted in the … Continue reading →