Speaker: Professor Daniel le Grange, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience, The University of Chicago, USA.
Parents are often blamed for their child's eating disorder. In fact, some clinicians and researchers have argued that parents' influence is particularly pernicious. Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support this notion, excluding parents from the treatment of their offspring, or 'parentectomy', was in vogue for much of the 19th century.
However, controlled treatment studies that have been conducted over the past few decades all show persuasively that parents are a resource in treatment and not a hindrance as has been advocated. In this family-based treatment that originated at the Maudsley Hospital in London, parents are guided to help bring about weight recovery much in the way that nurses would have done had their child been admitted to a specialist inpatient unit.
Consequently, the active involvement of parents in reversing self-starvation and/or binge eating and purging has been instrumental in improving prognosis and bringing about much improved treatment outcomes. This body of research compellingly underlines the importance of early recognition and treatment of anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder which typically onsets during adolescence.
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