Steps to Help Your Teen Child Recover From an Eating Disorder

Do you suspect that your child is suffering from an eating disorder? Do not ignore the problem and hope it will go away. Here are a few steps that can be taken to address the problem before it gets worse.

Identify the disorder

If you are observing a problem, regardless of the denials you are getting from your child, the first step is for you to identify whether there is a problem by carefully observing behaviour, food choices, and making notes that will help you to communicate this to a primary care professional or paediatrician if your child is under age 8. You may also do some initial research on the types of eating disorders, the signs and symptoms (including the hidden signs of the illness) and treatment choices.

Seek a professional evaluation

Your second step is to seek out a professional evaluation. While your family doctor will be of great service in helping you with the accompanying medical issues, especially full count blood tests, an eating disorder is a mental disorder that requires specialised psychological treatment. All children who are UK residents and NHS registered are entitled to a specialist evaluation in a case such as this, so do ask your GP for a specialist referral. Seeking out a full psychological and medical evaluation is important. If your child receives a diagnosis of an eating disorder, child and adolescent eating disorder treatment is obviously in order.

Find appropriate treatment

Your third step is to determine the appropriate level of treatment (inpatient or outpatient) and work with your NHS team or your private medical insurer to locate a facility. Of course, if paying privately, the choice of a facility depends only on bed availability and is up to you. Depending on how far the illness has progressed, you may need to seek inpatient treatment, intensive outpatient treatment or utilise an outpatient treatment team. A specialist service always should offer a psychologist, nutritionist and psychiatrist.

Fully participate in the treatment

Your fourth step is to participate fully in the treatment process as is appropriate for your child’s age, degree of treatment needed and medical complications. Most inpatient, partial hospitalisation or intensive outpatient teen eating disorder treatment programmes have opportunities for family involvement. Take advantage of all parent education sessions and/or family sessions that are offered. Given how deadly this disease can be, involving yourself in the treatment is the best way to improve its effectiveness for your whole family. You will learn about the condition, be better able to appropriately monitor your family member’s progress and know what changes you need to make individually as parents, and together as a family unit, to optimise and promote the recovery process.

Mentor and guardian role: learning to let go again

Finally, as your adolescent enters more fully into recovery, in addition to monitoring your own healthy changes your role becomes one of mentor and guardian of the recovery process. As a fully informed and engaged parent, you should support your child in the choices they make for continued recovery and help guide them back into recovery should they experience setbacks.

However, you will have to adjust the level of assistance and oversight you provide based on your child’s progress and demonstrated autonomy in the recovery process. This can be challenging for parents for many reasons, not the least of which is the fear that accompanies any life-threatening illness. Thus, parents have a natural tendency to over-monitor when the adolescent actually needs more independence in making healthy choices. Early on in the process of identifying the disease and seeking treatment, you needed to play a strong hand; however, once the recovery process begins in earnest, this strong hand can become too heavy. This is because to truly experience lasting recovery, the desire and determination must come from within the person with the disorder.

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Created on Mar 2nd 2020 00:17. Viewed 272 times.

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