Social Media: the New Forum for Eating Disorder Treatment

Medicine has largely neglected the care for people with eating disorders. Some hospitals across the country have doctors or even a small part of a ward dedicated to eating disorder treatment. However, the majority of eating disorder care occurs outside medical attention. Some psychiatrists or general physicians are involved when needed, but they are not central to treatment.

Psychologists focus more on eating disorder treatment and research. For the most part, psychology is interested in understanding the nature of people with eating disorders and assessing various treatment models for eating disorder care. This research has been much more helpful than medical research but remains limited in finding new directions for successful treatment.

For a set of illnesses vast in scope and still poorly understood and treated, eating disorders receive scant attention from traditional clinical models.

Social media created a new way for patients to come together and open up new ideas for care. People with eating disorders and other concomitant psychiatric and medical illnesses found each other online and began to establish a venue to discuss the overlap in various illnesses with eating disorders and even to hypothesize about the potential benefit for care.

Established academic institutions have started to follow up on these new concepts and research the connections between illnesses but without any clear and useful connection between diagnosis and new treatment yet.

For instance, ten years ago very few patients with an eating disorders and possible Attention Deficit Disorder would be prescribed a stimulant, such as Adderall, due to fears of appetite suppression and weight loss. Social media explored the connection between these two disorders which has led to a significant change in clinical care. Recent information and experience now show that treating ADD not only helps with attention but also eating disorder recovery.

This example is relevant in many other medical conditions: autism, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and autoimmune diseases, to name a few.

Eating disorder treatment is now a collaboration between clinician and patient more than it has ever been. Treatment continues to be a journey down a murky path without clear indication how and where the next steps might lead. There are clues about what works best and how to move forward. Following the path blindly often leads to a dead end and failure, but using all tools at our disposal—social media trends high on that list—improves outcomes greatly.

The conundrum in eating disorder treatment lies in pretending any clinician knows the right path. A more experienced one will have information to help find the right direction, but an individual patient’s experience and the knowledge they find online are more important than ever to lead to true recovery. Treatment necessitates flexibility, openness and collaboration in order to be successful.