We’re In This Together: Collaborative Care for Eating Disorders

This week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Janet Treasure on collaborative care in eating disorders. Treasure focused her workshop on supporting caregivers of people with eating disorders, offering practical skills for carers and clinicians alike to improve interactions with those with eating disorders. Though I am neither a carer nor a clinicians, I got a lot out of the workshop, and it reminded me of a few of Treasure’s articles I’ve read over the years, and how much I appreciate her strong focus on working collaboratively with patients and families to facilitate recovery.

I especially appreciated how she aims to integrate those with lived experience (of either having an eating disorder or caring for someone with an eating disorder) in research and treatment design. Some of her journal articles, including this article on the potential for harm in existing treatment models, even include former patients as … Continue reading →

Of Family Dynamics and Eating Disorders: Parents’ Experiences of Skills-Based Training

Parents of children with eating disorders face an extraordinarily difficult challenge; the work that they put into caring for their loved ones cannot be discounted. This can be especially challenging in the face of a social environment that tends toward parent-blaming for disorders. Further, the kinds of behaviors caregivers are obliged to encourage in the individual with an eating disorder (for example, eating calorically-dense foods in order to gain weight) are frowned upon, to say the least, in our “anti-obesity” oriented society.

There is a rich body of literature exploring caregiver well-being, including studies suggesting that increasing the availability of support in various forms from social to practical may help caregivers to navigate a complicated path toward supporting a loved one with an eating disorder. Researchers are asking key questions around what we can do to better support parents and other caregivers.

Along these lines, Goodier et al. (2014Continue reading →

In a Relationship and It’s Complicated: Eating Disorders in Intimate Relationships

What would you do if your partner started restricting caloric intake or bingeing and purging? Would you know how to approach your partner, how to offer support? And what about your own mental health?

Coping with an eating disorder in the context of any relationship can be tricky. There is a growing body of literature that addresses ways to bolster support for caregivers. While this is encouraging, a number of these studies explore the experiences of “caregivers” as a generic category encompassing parents, spouses, and other relatives. Few studies focus on the experiences of spouses and significant others in particular.

Dick, Renes, Morotti & Strange (2013) looked at literature exploring eating disorders in the couple context in an effort to devise recommendations for clinicians working with couples. For their review, the authors honed in on the experiences of heterosexual couples where the female partner was diagnosed with anorexia … Continue reading →