I sit at my desk drinking coffee; our patient census over the years is approaching two thousand children and young adults, the majority of whom have had anorexia nervosa or its variants.  And I am thinking about our boys.  

Given the approximate accepted statistic that 90% of patients with AN will be female, (even though the percentage is higher in younger patients), that still gives us around 200 boys.

Remember, with that many, if you think you recognize someone from these…

We get a lot of questions about how to handle college for an eating disordered young adult.  There is no one right way to handle all situations, but I will list a few of our ideas here.

#1:   Make a plan!  Do not just cross your fingers and hope that things will go well for your child. Wishful thinking is not your friend.

#2:   If  your college-bound child is currently active in their eating disorder, for example bingeing or purging at any frequency, losing weight, restricting their…

Family-based treatment for the young adult patient

For most of us when we are 17, 18, 19 or slightly older, independence from our family of origin can’t come a moment too soon.  We are anxious to be independent, and highly allergic to ‘being told what to do’.  And usually—though young folks often do not credit this—our parents are equally anxious for us to do so.  Although many of us parents are very tearful at the ‘loss’ of our child to our home, we are also excited to see them…

OK folks, as Laura Collins says:  “A new era of science-based, family inclusive and truly optimistic eating disorder treatment begins now.”

And it begins with the F.E.A.S.T. conference, the very first, in Alexandria, Virginia on November 3rd and 4th.

The keynote speaker is to be Dr Thomas Insel of the NIMH, perhaps the most prominent person to advocate the concept of anorexia nervosa as a brain disorder and to write an open letter to this effect.

This will not be another of the…

I am often asked: “do we really need to have all this treatment for our child’s eating disorder?  Can’t she/he just talk to someone once a week and not have it interfere with school/soccer/summer vacation/my work schedule?"

I imagine they could.  But then you’d get what people used to get: spotty and unreliable results.  In past decades, people with anorexia nervosa were ill for years, often long into adulthood.  Restricting eating disorders became more entrenched and soon purging was…

Occasionally we invite guest bloggers to write about their experiences in the field. Steve Nemirow has been, among many things, a intake co-ordinator at Kartini Clinic for many years, and has talked to hundreds of families about their struggles to find proper eating disorder treatment for their children. This is one of those conversations.

Life on the Fracture

Recently I was on the phone with a young father from a southwestern state, whose 8 y. o. son was refusing to eat any solid…

What does it mean to say a family member of a patient with anorexia nervosa is “affected” or “partially affected” with an eating disorder?

The last ten years have brought us a lot of new information about eating disorders in general and anorexia nervosa in particular.  One such bit of new information is the evidence of heritability of anorexia nervosa.  In a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry Dr Cynthia Bulik, a well known researcher from the University of North…

Even when thinking about eating disorders I can’t help but ask myself:  “wwbbd? --what would Botboy do?”
 
Who the heck is Botboy?
 
Well, the short answer is that Botboy is a social robot of my imagining, about whom I have written a book.  He is clever, dedicated, and in appearance looks something like a squarish metal human—but not too much. A longer, more significant answer is that he—and social robots like him—could be game-changing assistants of the future for people with chronic…

I find myself explaining this many times to parents and friends of our patients: there is a secret language to eating disorders, one our patients have taught us.  Unlike many other languages, however, this language consists mostly of an internal translator that takes what you say in English and translates it, transforms it, into something quite different.

These “translations” can be very distressing to the person speaking as well as to the person being spoken to, and the only good…

This week I am including an interesting blog I found on medscape.  Dr Puhl (the Director of Research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University) does a better job than I of examining this issue.

I ask you, is there no end to this madness?