"What works?"
That's the most common, and most painful question my daughter, Lisa, is getting as we give talks about our book, HUNGRY: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia (Berkley/Penguin, 2009). www.sheilahimmel.com
It is usually asked by a distraught parent, but we've had lots of uncles, aunts and family friends. Rarely does this get asked by the person suffering from anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder and/or obesity, even if that person is sitting right there.
We wish we knew.
"What should we do now?" When we were desperate for help, during Lisa's darkest days, Ned and I asked ourselves constantly. What we really wanted was for an expert to move in with us and tell us what to do.
We had to learn to say, "Okay, that didn't help. Now we have to try something else."
The first step, from Lisa's experience, has to come from the eating disorder patient. She or he somehow has to decide to get better, and participate in treatment rather than having it imposed, especially by parents. Good evidence of this would be the patient being able to ask his or her own questions in a public forum.
However, brain function can be so impaired that loved ones may not have the luxury of waiting for this hopeful moment. The mortality rate is just too high.
Assuming you are not dealing with a medical emergency, treatment options are all over the map, geographically and philosophically. In the literal sense of A-Z, we can go from acupuncture to zinc supplements, and hit every letter in between. B vitamins, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, day treatment, EEG ...
Ned and I traveled to Chimayo, New Mexico, and brought home healing dirt for Lisa. We are not healing-dirt people, but it felt like we had lost our daughter to a dangerous cult and we had to fight for her life.
The key for Lisa was finding the right practitioner, an expert in eating disorders whom Lisa felt "got" her, understood her, right away. That person happened to be a psychoanalyst. Lisa describes their first meeting:
Her manner was never critical or too aggressive. She knew I was incredibly fragile and let me go as slowly as I needed. I lay on her couch, just staring blankly at her. ... I needed time to open up and be in the world a bit.
Lisa likes to talk, though, and prefers the attention of one trusted person. Another patient might, to resume our alphabet soup of treatment options, do better with food journals, group therapy, herbs, imagery (guided) ...
In future posts, we'll look at some exciting, surprising sources of hope for treatment of eating disorders. Among them: a life coach, a psychoanalyst, a neuroscientist, and a researcher who believes eating disorders often are autoimmune conditions, caused by bacteria ingested with a long-ago meal.
If you've been surprised by a successful treatment of eating disorders, please let me know!
"What works?" is an exciting question.
