Treating Anorexia

Treating Anorexia - Initially, the chief target of therapy is to bring the patient's weight back up to a safe level, A goal that must often be undertaken in a residential treatment setting, such as a hospital. To achieve weight gain, most therapies use behavioral approaches, such as operant conditioning. Usually, operant conditioning provides positive reinforcements, such as social visits in return for eating or weight gain. However, behavioral treatments in a hospital setting alone may fail to generalize to the home setting (Garfinkel & Garner, 19820 because of family and environmental factors that may induce or maintain the nehavior.

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Once weight has been restored to a safe level, additional therapies are needed. Family therapy may be initiared to help families learn more positive methods of communicating emotion and conflict. Psychotherpy to improve self-esteem and to teach skills for adjusting to stress and social preasure may also be incorporated into treatment (A. Hall & Crisp, 1983). The outlook for anorexic patients receiving therapy intervention reporting success rates of 85% (Minuchen, Rosman, & Baker, 1978). Other interventions have tried to address social norms regarding thinness directly (for example, Neumarksztainer et al., 2003). For example, one study gave women information about other women's weight and body type, on the grounds that women with eating disoders often wrongly believe that other women are smaller and thinner than they actually are (Sanderson, Darley, & Messinger, 2002). The intervention succeeded increasing women's estimates of their actual and ideal weight (Mutterperl & Sanderson, 2002).

Because of the health risks of anorexia nervosa, research has increasingly moved toward prevention; yet the factors that may prevent new cases from arising may be quite different from those that lead students who already have symptoms to seek out treatment (Mann et al., 1997). An eating disorder prevention program aimed at college freshman presented the students with classmates who had recorvered from an eating disorder, described their experience, and provide information. To the researchers' dismay, following the intervention, the participants had slightly more symtomsof eating disorders than those who had not participated. The program may have been ineffective because, by reducing the stigma of these disorders, it inadvertently normalized the problem. Consequently, as Mann and her collegues (1997) concluded, ideal strategies for prevention may require stressing the health risks of eating disorders, whereas the strategies for inducing symptomatic women to seek treatment may involve normalizing the behavior and urging women to accept treatment.