Why It’s so Hard to Find Help for an Eating Disorder

This time of year seems to be a season people are much more likely to contact me to start treatment for an eating disorder. I’m not sure why I receive the most contacts in June and July, yet it appears to be the same every year.

One common refrain from these contacts is how hard it is to find clinicians who are trained to treat people with eating disorders. I often hear that people have seen several therapists, frequently for a sufficient period of time, and found the treatment to have limited focus on food and eating. After a series of failed attempts, it’s hard to keep trying.

Even if i don’t have availability, people are just as grateful to be pointed in the right direction. A true referral to someone trained to treat people with eating disorders is hard to find, even in a town like New York that is packed with mental health practitioners.

The unfortunate truth is that there is no standard certificate or training to treat people with eating disorders. Despite the increased incidence of these illnesses in recent decades, there is still no way to ascertain if someone is actually trained. Any clinician can claim the expertise and have no true training.

The same is true for psychiatrists as well. My training came from participating in the UCLA eating disorders program for two years where I was trained by doctors who helped create the field in the 1980’s. But in many ways, finding that training was just by luck.

For therapists, claiming this expertise is a quick way to increase clients. There are so many people searching for therapists who know how to help people with eating disorders that this claim will lead to increased work, even if that work is completely ineffective.

Psychiatrists tend to be much more wary about claiming this expertise. Unlike most psychiatric illnesses, people with eating disorder have many medical problems that often go beyond the knowledge base of a psychiatrist and bring more medical risk into practice than psychiatrists prefer.

Overall it makes finding experienced clinicians difficult. The key is to ask more details about someone’s training, practice and experience. It’s perfectly acceptable to know how much of someone’s practice is people with eating disorders and to know if they themselves were trained by experts. The road of treatment is hard and it has to begin with a treatment provider able to open up a path to wellness.