Some interesting thoughts on truth vs. lies from two of my favorite philosophers — Mark Twain and Gregory House.
“If you tell the truth, you don’t need to remember anything.”
– Mark Twain
“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.”
“It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.”
“I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”
– Gregory House

So, while everyone lies sometimes, people struggling with an eating …

I’m a sucker for lists… especially top-10 lists. So, when I saw a post on the Top 10 Cracks That Addicts Fall Through on Their Way to Recovery, it had my name all over it.
I think that a lot of the same principles that Mark Goulston points out can apply to mental illness in general. A few of them really stood out to me:
Failure to develop new and healthy relationships
I see this two ways:

Old relationships – maintaining unhealthy relationships (people who drag you down in any way, …

I’ve recently started watching Grey’s Anatomy again. I got behind (really behind) and always thought I would catch up… but it hasn’t happened, so I’m just going to have to go back and watch the last season at some point. That might not happen for awhile, though, so I’m just picking up with the current season and moving on.
A lot of Meredith’s monologes hit home with me, but she said something the other day about surgery and recovery that really hit me:
“The goal of any surgery is total …

Several weeks ago I wrote a post — that I never published — titled, “I need an iPad for recovery.” There has been a lot of negative press about eating disorders and technology, so in contrast I’m going to explain how I’ve used my iPhone / iPad to aid my recovery…

Recently, my friend and I were discussing the pros/cons of her stepping up the level of care in her treatment. Interestingly, “eating in program” was on both the pro and con list. She thinks it’s easier to eat while in program (as opposed to on your own), but that some of the food sucks and you have to eat things you don’t like (or are not comfortable with).
I can definitely relate to this. When you first start a higher level of care (like IOP, PHP, IP – anything involving a …

Everyone has heard the phrase about things having to get worse before getting better. However, it doesn’t say MAKE things worse so that they can get better. It doesn’t exactly work like that. I see a couple of different situations where people “try to get out of the eating disorder by going [further] into their eating disorder”:

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 …

My new FAVORITE article.
Diagnostic Crossover in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa:
Implications for DSM-V
(Am J Psychiatry 2008; 165:245–250)
I actually think this whole study was amazing and definitely recommend reading it if you can (and I’m always a skeptic, so this is rare that I’d say this).  That said, I don’t think that the study does much for defining, validating, or invalidating the ED-NOS diagnosis.
 I think that this is brilliant, and should be used for actual diagnosis… not just as a measure in this study:
The Eating Disorders Longitudinal Interval Follow-up Evaluation was …