There have been many blog posts written on facebook and pro-anorexia, however, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about facebook and recovery in general.
Facebook is really unique in that EVERYONE (okay, almost everyone) is on it.  If you’re an eating disorder patient, this means your professionals, the other girls/guys you’re in treatment with, past patients, your school / work friends who may not know about your eating disorder, your family members, etc.  In what other realm do all of these people connect?
For most people, “Facebook stalking” means checking out what …

I have mixed feelings about putting adolescents and adults together in treatment. I have been on both sides of the equation (treatment as an adolescent and treatment as an adult), and definitely have a stronger opinion about it now that I’m older.
Pros:

Adolescents can learn a lot from adults who often have been in treatment before and have some more insight into the disorder.
Adults are (hopefully) more mature and less competitive. Eating disorders in general are competitive… and I’ve just found that when you have a large group of …

Do you ever feel like this in therapy? You’re talking about something random that happened in your childhood that you’re nearly POSITIVE has nothing to do with your issues today?
For example….
Before kindergarten I got to try out three different schools — and my parents did not send me to the one that I liked! And then I had to play with this girl who my mom was friends with who I did not get along with. Trauma! Oh, and there was this boy in kindergarten who …

‘But I ask myself if an eating disorder unit is the best place for an impressionable young girl to be,’ says Deanne Jade. ‘As any inpatient will tell you, a specialist unit is the best place to learn how to be really, really good at anorexia.’ They also breed their own subculture.
– Still at war with our bodies

Oh, what a statement! This article is a couple of years old, but I still think it’s bold to suggest that the “highest level of care” for eating disorders actually makes …

Well, I am officially the last one to jump on the “New Psychotherapy Has Potential to Treat Majority Of Cases Of Eating Disorders” article. I’ll admit, this journalist did a great job with his headline — not only did I read the article, but I went on to read up on CBT-E.
To quickly define CBT, Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders explains:
The strategy underpinning CBT-E is to construct a ‘formulation’ (or set of hypotheses) of the processes that are maintaining the patient’s psychopathology and use it to identify …

I am officially the LAST person to blog about this study, but my thoughts seem to be pointed in a different from the other posts that I’ve read.
The Psych Central article, “Half of Young Adults Have Mental Disorder,” states the following:
“A total of 45.8 percent of college students and 47.7 percent of young adults not in college met the criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder.
The most common disorders in college students were alcohol use disorders (20.4 percent) and personality disorders (17.7 percent), whereas those not in college most frequently …

Around one third of patients [with anorexia] recovery fully; another third improve significantly and the last third do not recover.
–Eating Disorders Factfile

I had a therapist explain this statistic to me once…
Group 1: Full recovery – The individual either recovers on her own or with treatment. The duration of the illness doesn’t really matter… what’s important is that the she goes on to live a relatively symptom-free life.
Group 2: Significant improvement – This could mean two things: Either the individual improves to a point where she can have a life …

If you are at immediate physical risk, you need inpatient treatment.
If you are not making progress in outpatient therapy, you need something more intensive.
If you’ve been doing great for months and have an established support system, you can decrease your level or frequency of treatment.
… but, is there such a thing as “touch-up” treatment?
In the spirit of my remission and relapse post, I’d like to emphasize the many shades of gray between the two extremes.  You don’t wake up one morning to have fallen off the recovery cliff overnight (though …

There has been a lot of talk about remission in eating disorders lately, and I couldn’t be happier to hear about it. I have long believed that EDs are chronic and that even though it’s probably possible to reach a point of 98% recovery, there’s no hitting 100%. There is no recoverED.
While this probably sounds depressing, I actually think that the idea of remission is very validating. It gives you another shade of gray in the sick to healthy spectrum. Plus, I think there’s a fear …

“I’m not going to rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.” — Rogers Morton
I think that during recovery, a lot of people get stuck rearranging deck chairs. While you’re spending all this time working on some trivial issue, your overall recovery progress is stagnant (at best).
Examples from my own history:
* Dozens of Dermatologist appointments during the height of my eating disorder (I’m sure my acne was caused mostly by nutrition issues). When asking my Dermatologist about the depression side-effect of Accutane (since I was already …