E-Book Table of Contents:
(Click here to read the
Table of Contents)
Doing What Works -
The Professionals’ Guide to Treating Eating Disorders
by Abigail H. Natenshon, MA, LCSW, GCFP
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Etiology
The Meaning and Origins of Eating Disorders
What eating disorders are about
This chapter describes what eating disorders are and are not, their implications and meaning for both victim and family and for the broader community. Clinicians need a clear understanding of these factors in order to effectively recognize, diagnose, and treat these hard to detect diseases. Practitioners must know the facts so that they can teach them to their patients; eating disorder practitioners are educators as much as they are therapists and physicians.
- Definitions
- Eating disorders present differently in every patient. Learn to recognize what you see.
- Eating disorders say a lot about a patient’s needs and coping capacities. Emotions underlie and drive the behaviors of eating disorders.
- The extremism and rigidity that is characteristic of eating disorders carries over into other life spheres.
- Prevalence and statistics: The bad news and the good news.
- Etiology; Eating disorder onset is a process that develops over time, evolving along a continuum of otherwise normal behaviors.
- Triggers to disease onset: some may be as benign as reaching one’s 9th birthday!
- Myths and misconceptions leading lead to misdiagnosis.
- An ounce of eating disorder prevention is better than a pound of the most effective cure.
- Anticipating the development of an eating disorder in the young child is key to prevention.
Chapter Two: Recognizing Disease
Do you have a patient with an eating disorder?
It is critical for professionals to learn to recognize eating disorders, as well as the precursor signs of eating disorders-in-the-making, as early detection is the key to a timely treatment and a successful prognosis. It is also critical that professionals educate parents sufficiently about what to look for so that parents can become the best diagnosticians they can be. Eating disorders are more likely to show up at the kitchen table than in the doctor’s office. By their very nature, eating disorders are secretive diseases that are hard to discern.
- What makes eating disorders so hard to detect?
- Might your own personal issues obstruct your professional perceptions?
- Disease, benign quirk or a sign of misinformation? Eating disorders are not to be confused with disordered or quirky eating.
- What is healthy eating, after all?
- The truth about dieting.
- Early warning signs; red flags.
- Signs of clinical disease
- Reading between the lines; How much evidence do you need?
- Weight must not be the standard for diagnosis
- Special populations; the elderly, young children, infants
- Rule out organic disease first!
- Predicting eating disorders; seeing into the future.
- The power of the off-hand comment
- Detecting eating disorders in males
Chapter Three: The Role of Parents in their Child’s Illness and Recovery
If not part of the solution, parents risk becoming part of the problem
Parents are their child’s greatest advocates. A child with an eating disorder is in crisis and needs parental guidance now more than ever. Myths and misconceptions about the role of parents can derail a child’s treatment recovery. An educated parent is an empowered parent.
- Parents are not the cause of their child’s eating disorder.
- Parents play a major role in disease prevention as well as cure.
- Parents are typically the last to know.
- When insecurity meets misconceptions.
- Professionals have personal issues too.
- When parents’ personal issues interfere
- The parent’s role as part of the treatment team.
- Parents in support of recovery.
- The tie that binds; the quality of the parent/child connection
- The parent’s role with the grown child living away from home
- When parents cannot be of assistance.
Chapter Four: The Challenges of Effective Intervention
Eating Disorder Treatment: A Process Unique and Apart
Through utilizing the resources in this book, health professionals no longer need to refer their eating disordered patients out to other specialists…nor do they need to fear that their patient’s learning and growth could be curtailed because of their own lack of experience and expertise.
- The earliest form of intervention is in the hands of parents and families.
- Early professional intervention nips disease in the bud
- Treatment styles that work; cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic and family systems
- Milieu appropriateness; out patient versus inpatient work
- Treatment modes; individual, family and group psychotherapy
- Utilizing resources to enhance patient self awareness
- Coaching parents and peers
- The challenges of professional intervention; every session a new beginning
- Factors that complicate the treatment process.
- Recognizing and addressing patient resistance.
Chapter Five: The Unique Role of the Health Professional in Treating Eating Disorders
The Professional’s unique use of self in a unique treatment process
Eating disorder treatment is a specialty treatment, as it requires special understanding, relationship skills and emotional resourcefulness on the part of the professional.
- The philosopher and teacher within you
- The diagnostic process never ends
- Reality tester versus confidant; Maintaining the delicate balance
- Recognizing and addressing your own resistance
- Containing internal demons; the professional as private person
- The requirements of professional team function
- Interpersonal challenges within the professional team
- Lending your own ego
- Don’t take it personally! Perceiving “No” as the start of a new conversation
- Integration and versatility; the multi-taking professional
- Juggling the goal diversity within the players, within the process.
- Promoting learning and trusting; Meeting the challenges of the first therapy session
- Balancing the contradictory needs of the therapy moment
- The on-going challenge of interacting with parents
- The Professional Team; Who Does What
Chapter Six: Important Tips on Dealing with Parents and Families of Children in Treatment for Eating Disorders: Case Studies
- Teach parents to become reality testers for their child.
- Teach parents to become limit setters, to create the “bottom line.”
- Teach parents to establish priorities.
- Teach parents what healthy eating is.
- Teach parents to use consequences intelligently and purposefully.
- Teach parents to express themselves with their child assertively and appropriately.
- Teach parents to understand that what they see as a “healthy eating and exercise lifestyle” in themselves may come home to roost in unhealthy behaviors in their child.
- Reframe a parent’s anxious concerns into proactive child mentoring.
- Teach parents that when they learn to interact effectively with their child around the eating disorder, they will know how to interact effectively around other life issues as well.
Chapter Seven: Shepherding a Unique and Often Convoluted Recovery Process
Psychotherapist Abigail H. Natenshon has specialized in the treatment of eating disorders with individuals, families, and groups for the past 34years. She is the author of When Your Child Has An Eating Disorder, A Step-by-Step Workbook For Parents And Other Caregivers, Jossey-Bass, 1999. Based on hundreds of successful outcomes, this book shepherds concerned parents step-by-step through the processes of eating disorder recognition, confronting the child, finding the most effective treatment for patient and family, and evaluating and insuring a timely recovery. A guide to eating disorder prevention, this book is useful to parents, health professionals and school personnel alike in countering the pervasive epidemic of unhealthy eating and body image concerns, and destructive media and peer influences. Her work can be reviewed further at www.empoweredparents.com and www.empoweredkidZ.com.
|
