Eating Disorders in Women and Children: Prevention, Stress Management, and Treatment PDF

Foreword

When I was a young woman being treated for an eating disorder, certain assumptions were made. If you had an eating disorder, you would be a white adolescent girl from a family with a controlling mother and an absent father. You would display a passive personality and low self-esteem. You would in all likelihood have signs of depression; whether you did or not, you would probably be treated for it. Your treatment team would see and treat you as childish and immature, and hold a variety of vague and often unfounded opinions about who you were, where you'd been, and what kind of chances of recovery you had. Those chances were considered, almost across the board, very low indeed.

I was treated for eating disorders in the 1980s and 1990s. The medical and therapeutic understanding of the etiology, nature, and treatment of disordered eating and body image had not changed markedly since the early days of eating disorder research 20 years before. Likewise, the limited understanding of the demographics of eating disordered populations ensured that thousands would go undiagnosed and untreated. While the eating disordered population exploded, research and treatment providers held fast to their notions of what they were dealing with and how they should proceed. Their abysmal success rates bewildered them; they attributed these low rates of recovery to the intractable, probably incurable nature of the diseases.

his second edition of Eating Disorders in Women and Children: Prevention, Stress Management, and Treatment is being released into a therapeutic community that has changed in many critical ways, and I believe the community will see further change as a result of the research done here. At the heart of this research is an assumption that was not always made, which must be made if treatment is to have the impact that it can and should have. This book sees the people who struggle with eating disorders as people-as individuals, with individual histories and reasons for developing their disease, and as individuals living in a society that is deeply stressful, and profoundly hospitable to the flourishing of eating disorders in more communities every day.

This book recognizes the multifaceted, multifactorial nature of these diseases, addresses the wide-and widening-demographic range of people who have them, and, importantly, delves into the deeper issues behind their development. This critically insightful perspective has enormous implications for advances in treatment. By exploring in detail the role of stress in eating disordered people's lives, and the use of eating disorders as a means of managing and easing that stress, this edition identifies etiological risk factors, physiological implications, and a range of treatment modalities that help patients create alternative methods of coping in their lives. The practical application of this information suggests enormous hope for an improvement in treatment and real help for the people who so painfully struggle with eating disorders every day.

By also stressing the importance of early identification and prevention-areas far too often overlooked in eating disorder literature-this book not only explores specific ways in which at-risk individuals can be helped but also explores critical measures that can be taken to help the larger population understand and work to prevent eating disorders in their communities. This emphasis goes to the heart of what our society must do if we hope to change our cultural perspective on how these disorders develop, and therefore our understanding of how to prevent their ongoing spread.

This book notes that "dissatisfaction with one's body appears to be ubiquitous for women." What sets this book apart from many others is its emphasis on the critically important factor of the social continuum on which eating disorders exist. Until we truly recognize and acknowledge the fact that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating have pervaded nearly every corner of our society, we will not understand clinical eating disorders. And until we understand the society in which people with eating disorders are developing their illnesses, we will remain unable to treat them effectively.

Eating Disorders in Women and Children: Prevention, Stress Management, and Treatment does-and goes beyond-what new eating disorder literature needs to do. It clearly explicates the nature of the disorders, explores a range of treatment modalities, and identifies critical risk factors; the research on the influence of stress in eating disordered populations published here represents enormously important new insights into the disorders, their treatment, and the people who have them.

In recognizing and exploring the individuality of people with eating disorders, and identifying the disorders' multifaceted social aspects, this book makes a significant contribution to the research currently informing treatment of these diseases. Departing from the tired, and increasingly inaccurate, notions that have so long governed eating disorder research and therapeutic models, this book moves into new territory, and does so with insight that will be of enormous benefit to its readers.

The work contained here has the potential to directly and dramatically improve the lives and recovery processes of real people. Eating disorders are not theoretical fields of research; they are devastating, too-often deadly illnesses, the treatment of which has a long way to go. This book is an enormous and important step in that direction, and it will be critical reading for anyone who hopes to understand, and help, people with eating disorders.