The Need for Inclusive Eating Disorder Treatment

Typically eating disorders are treated as psychological illnesses. A doctor manages any medical symptoms, lab abnormalities and medications, but the primary work in recovery is mental and emotional in nature. The root cause of an eating disorder is almost always seen as a mental health issue.

For many people with eating disorders, this paradigm is accurate. Separation and individuation from an enmeshed parent relationship, numbing of emotions from traumatic experiences and the strong desire to avoid adulthood are still common initial events that lead to an eating disorder. Treatment still needs to encompass these clinical situations.

However, more correlative data links eating disorders with other medical and psychiatric disorders—a connection elucidated in the last post. Treating these concomitant, if not perhaps causative, illnesses falls outside the purview of typical eating disorder treatment.

For instance, chronic inflammatory illnesses such as MCAS or general autoimmune symptoms may be alleviated through eating disorder symptoms. The same may be true for people with chronic metabolic issues. If these patients recover from their eating disorder, the medical symptoms return and often worsen; thus, recovery needs to address these other medical issues to allow people to recover and manage these other illnesses too.

Similarly, eating disorder symptoms may help mitigate some psychiatric symptoms for people with untreated ADHD or undiagnosed autism. Eating disorder recovery that doesn’t address these other disorders won’t be helpful for true recovery.

Eating disorder treatment not only needs to screen for other connected medical or psychiatric illnesses but also needs to incorporate a more complete approach to allow for full recovery.

The standard psychiatric treatment screens out many people with other comorbid medical or psychiatric illnesses when the approach needs to be more inclusive. These other patients deserve more complete treatment too.