Don’t believe everything you think you see
I was watching breakfast TV and a story came up of three Youtubers who had just set a world record for the worlds highest basketball shot. They made the shot from 200 metres up, from the top of cliff in Maletsunyane Falls in Semonkong, Lesotho in South Africa. Watch the video here. It seems a bit meaningless, but pretty cool that someone can make this shot. I could notice my mind going ‘how amazing, those guys [...]
Guest Blog Post – Is weight recovery enough?
Dr Mandy Goldstein We are excited to have another guest blog post today. Dr Mandy Goldstein is a clinical psychologist with 10 years’ experience in the treatment of eating disorders and trauma, across inpatient and outpatient settings. She is the Principal Clinical Psychologist at Mandy Goldstein Psychology, and works as an Associate at The Redleaf Practice. Mandy completed her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Macquarie University, where her research was focused on enhancing the treatment of eating [...]
Guest Blog Post – Family Led Refeeding & Recovery
Today The Redleaf Practice welcomes a guest blogger, Belinda Caldwell, who is a carer consultant and project manager with the Victorian Centre for Excellence in Eating Disorders. Belinda is the mother of a daughter who developed anorexia nervosa in 2011 at the age of 16 and participated in treatment at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne with FBT. She previously worked as CEO of APNA, the peak professional organisation for nurses in primary health care and has [...]
Resources for parents and carers
Caring for a loved one with an eating disorder can be an overwhelming experience, particularly if you are just starting out on the journey. Below are a range of different resources that you may find helpful to access additional information or support from other carers. How far it too far? This website is a great early intervention resource for people looking for information to increase their understanding of the risk factors and early warning signs related [...]
Words can be tricky things
Words can be tricky things and need to be used carefully. A brief article by former editors of the International Journal of Eating Disorders (Weissman et al., 2016) look at words we should avoid or reconsider in the field of eating disorders. The article seems largely written for researchers submitting articles to the journal, but has application to clinicians as well. Terms that we should no longer use include “anorexic” “bulimic” and “binge eater”. These terms [...]
How long should eating disorder treatment take?
We are often asked how long should treatment take. At the recent ICED in New York there was a plenary on shorter treatments where the panel seemed to feel that short treatments were equivalent to longer treatments. Put another way, most change in eating disorder symptoms occurs early in treatment. This of course is true in some cases and predicts a better outcome. If all patients could turn up highly motivated to change and successfully manage the difficulty [...]
A helpful stance and information for carers
Treatment manuals tell clinicians what to do in therapy. They outline the things that we think to be useful in helping someone suffering from an eating disorder. What is underemphasised in those manuals is the stance of the therapist that may be most helpful in making the most of the treatment manual. Collaboration or Direction? A ‘collaborative stance’ is central to most therapies. Josie Geller from Canada is one of the worlds leading investigators of stance [...]
Did they just take the F out of FBT
A recent, and important article has just been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by Le Grange et al. The paper is the results of a Randomised Controlled Trial of Family Based Treatment (FBT) and Parent Focused Treatment (PFT) done at Royal Childrens’ Hospital in Melbourne. FBT is probably well known to most in the field. PFT is a variant of FBT which is very interesting. There is a manual available [...]