The Generator of Progress in Eating Disorder Care: Social Media

Progress in diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry historically relies on the experience and knowledge of clinicians who use their time with patients, educate themselves about new treatment ideas and collaborate with colleagues to further the field and hopefully improve overall clinical care.

Social media opens a new door to how the field progresses. Patients themselves express original ideas based on their lived experience and communicate with each other to find ways to assess and even consider new treatment for their condition. And this new path is starting to affect progress in psychiatry.

One result is to connect other medical and psychiatric illnesses to eating disorders, as I wrote about in the last two posts. People are communicating with other patients about these connections and bringing to light new ways to conceive of eating disorders.

The medical establishment, however, has not yet caught up with the findings. Clinical work remains fixed in older ways to treat eating disorders. Accordingly, patients come to treatment with new ideas about the individual symptoms and possible treatment for their own eating disorders and then try to find clinicians willing to work with them.

Social media has changed the way psychiatry is going to treat patients with eating disorders. The more difficult the disorders are to treat, the more patients are likely to look into alternative options and shop for doctors open to these new ideas.

So clinicians need to take these new concepts into account. Moreover, comprehensive assessment of eating disorders, including concomitant psychiatric and medical conditions, is imperative.

Patients will find other ways to get the help they need by cobbling together doctors who will do separate assessments and then find their own individual way to try to get well. The more clinicians band together to create a better way to assess eating disorders, the less patients will feel compelled to try to piece together their own treatment.

Treatment is no longer clinicians diagnosing and making treatment plans. The process of eating disorder treatment needs to be collaborative.