Treating an Eating Disorder

Eating disorders are definitely not easy to treat, mainly because what causes them is a complex mixture of emotional, psychological and natural elements that need to be taken separately and cured. Some eating disorders such as compulsive overeating may be treated with more ease than others (bulimia or anorexia for example). A very important element in treating an eating disorder is the state in which it was discovered in: if the condition causing it has been allowed to settle in and the eating disorder is more an addiction than anything else, then it will be obviously harder to cure than if it were discovered early on. What we’ll do in the following article is dissect the causes of most eating disorders (which are oftentimes similar for all types of ED’s) and see how each can be treated.

Psychological causes

Some eating disorders appear in the course of a developmental disorder, such as mental retardation, or pervasive developmental disorder. Some examples would be Pica, binge eating or anorexia. These psychological causes are probably the hardest to treat, since the sufferer will oftentimes be reluctant towards them or simply will not have the capacity to collaborate with the treatment.

Sometimes, the eating disorder may trigger certain psychological afflictions but the treatment will be equally hard to apply, so the order in which the disorder and psychological cause forms up is not really that important. Some researchers believe that having similar psychological problems along one’s family tree will have an increased chance of that particular individual to develop these problems or eating disorders.

Psychological treatment

If the eating disorder comes with an acute psychological problem, the treatment needs to take care of both issues at the same time. The eating disorder’s treatment will be specific, consisting of a balanced diet, obtaining a normal body weight for the patient (for bulimia and anorexia mostly), removing non-foods from one’s nutritional habits (in cases of Pica) and so forth. Additionally, the psychological problem will be treated through psychiatry, medication or simply through family guidance.

In some cases, where the psychological part of the problem doesn’t allow the individual to cooperate with the treatment willingly, an aversion therapy is used. This therapy associates bad consequences to lack of treatment following and good consequences when the patient is compliant with the program. Although some consider this a rather rudimentary way of treating someone of a psychological disorder, it is often the only way to do it, so it’s a case of choosing the “better evil”. Aversion therapy treatments can have side effects later on, especially if the patient treated was of young age.

The next part of this article will cover the treatment of emotional problems associated with eating disorders. Since most eating disorders have an emotional component, this part of the treatment is of utter importance and needs to be treated accordingly.