Brodin

Examining Mandometer(r) Founders' 10 "Reasons" Why Eating Disorders Are Not Mental Disorders – Part II

Tetyana 8 Comments

This is the last post in my mini-series on the Mandometer® Treatment. (Links to earlier posts here: Part I, Part II, and Part III). In this post I’m going to continue examining Bergh et al.’s reasons for why eating disorders are not mental disorders (#6-10). In my last post I omitted something important: I didn’t define mental disorders, but to avoid repeating myself, please see my comment on the topic here.

Bergh et al.’s reason #6 why EDs are not mental disorders:

Reason #6. Gender differences argue against an underlying mental health disorder. Women constitute more than 90% of eating disorder patients (Hoek & van Hoeken, 2003), but teenage males are more likely to have OCD than teenage females (Fireman, Koran, Leventhal, & Jacobson, 2001), and there are no differences in the prevalence of anxiety and anxiety-related disorders in male and female teens (Beesdo, Knappe, &

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The Finest Quality Snake Oil: Mandometer(r) Treatment for Eating Disorders – Part I

Tetyana 6 Comments

PROTIP: When selling your snake oil treatment, try NOT to make wildly outrageous efficacy claims. But if you can’t resist that temptation, try to limit your hard-to-believe, eye-roll-inducing claims to your treatment — there’s no need to go further.

In this post, I’m going to give a brief history of the Mandometer® treatment and its apparent rationale. In the next one or two posts, I will do an analysis of the most recently study by the group that claims to show remission rates of 75% and relapse rates of only 10%. Sounds great, right? Well… we’ll see.

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We suggest that the reason self-starving patients do not fit the DSM-IV criteria of anorexia nervosa is because there is in fact no psychopathological basis of the disorder … The DSM-IV offers no definition [of psychopathology], but it is reasonable to assume that a psychopathological basis of anorexia nervosa would be reflected

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