Proper Eating Disorder Treatment Must Include Treating All Aspects Of The Disease

Eating Disorder Treatment

As eating disorders operate on both physical and psychological levels, so it is that eating disorder treatment must pose both physical and psychological solutions to them. Indeed, successful eating disorder treatment is that which treats eating disorder victims in their totality: in mind and in body and in everything in between. At the same time, it's important to reemphasize that effective eating disorder treatment is and can only be the product of patients' engagement with the healing process. Again, to beat an eating disorder, you've got to play an active role in your own recovery.

The first phase of eating disorder treatment, like Bulimia treatment, concerns itself primarily with physical healing: with ensuring that eating disorder treatment patients get the emergency nutritional care they need, and with working to alleviate the chemical imbalances that trigger eating disorders in the first place. Most significantly, eating disorders are often linked to irregular levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the human brain, which means that effective eating disorder treatment must often include pharmacological therapies to restore a patient to metabolic normalcy. It's only with that sort of biochemical stability that eating disorder recovery can go forward.

Of course, such biochemical stability is only a precursor to substantive eating disorder treatment, because again eating disorders themselves are both physical and psychological diseases. Eating disorder recovery that lasts, in the end, must be that which is grounded in thorough emotional and personal growth; eating disorder treatment patients have to learn new ways of relating to food, nutrition, and to themselves if they're ever going to get better for good. To master an eating disorder, you might say, you've first got to be able to master yourself.

And, to reemphasize a point that really should speak for itself: It's not easy. Eating disorder treatment is a struggle, and eating disorder recovery takes work. No one gets better in an eating disorder treatment center without straining a little along the way…which means that the eating disorder treatment patient who gets healed is more often than not the eating disorder treatment patient who commits himself to the process, and resolves himself to the fight. The bottom line: Your destiny in an eating disorder treatment center is ultimately in your hands. What you do with it is up to you.

Eating Disorders and Depression

As is true of many psychologically-oriented diseases, eating disorders rarely exist in isolation. Of particular note here is the connection between eating disorders and clinical depression: Both conditions have been empirically linked to irregular serotonin levels in the brain, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that eating disorder victims often exhibit symptoms of depressions. The important corollary, of course, is that eating disorder treatment patients are often in need of depression counseling, and that effective eating disorder treatment programs must entail comprehensive mental health screenings.

It's a simple point, really: An eating disorder victim, whether its Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia, who suffers from depression can't beat his eating disorder without proper depression treatment. Eating disorder treatment that fails to account for depression, in fact, isn't really eating disorder treatment at all, and eating disorder recovery that leaves depression untouched is and must be inevitably bound to fail.

What that means, of course, is that any competent eating disorder treatment program must be preceded by a thorough mental health screening. The eating disorder treatment center that's right for you is the one that treats you, all of you, as you really are; eating disorder treatment that works can only be that which addresses every patient as a unique individual. To put it as simply as possible: If you're an eating disorder victim suffering from depression, your eating disorder treatment plan has got to include depression counseling.

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