Eating Disorders: Bulimia, Binge Eating, Anorexia, Vomiting
Eating disorders are one of the psychological disorders most effected by the times and culture that we live in; this class of pathology is in constant and rapid evolution, and thus needs to be constantly studied in order to provide effective treatment.
Today eating disorders are surely connected to the overwhelming importance given by mass media to a person's appearance: the need to be slim and have a model like figure is one of underlying drives that lead to eating disorders in order to obtain such idealized appearance.
People's common attempts to control food and the desire to eat by trying out various kinds of diets, ends up triggering what brief strategic therapy describes as the control which inevitably leads to losing control.
This has recently led brief strategic therapy research to devise groundbreaking forms of interventions for bulimic, anorexic and vomiting patients.
Binge Eating:
Binge eating is an eating disorder which is characterized by the presence of long periods of abstinence from food alternated with overcontrolled diets, leading to situations of intensive transgression when the person gives into the pleasure of binging.
The person establishes an attempted solution of keeping control by abstaining from food, but this continuously striving to keep control is inevitably interrupted by a subsequent loss of control.
It's a paradoxical mechanism where the more the person forces herself to keep control over food, the more she ends up losing it, leading to further complicating the problem.
Anorexia:
Is undoubtedly the most studied eating disorder in scientific literature, given the alarming threat of starvation and death.
Our research and work has allowed us to avoid the often intimidating nosographic description of this disorder and to focus on a more operative description, giving us necessary information to overcome this disorder.
Anorexic patients are people who have mastered the art of manipulating their own bodies, are capable of living on extremely low amounts of food, often without realizing the decaying effect their abstinence is having on their health.
Although this type of disorder may require longer time for the intervention to consolidate its effects, brief strategic therapy is capable of breaking the rigidity of this pathology by respecting and utilizing the profound sensitivity these people often express.
Sometimes, people suffering from anorexia, like those suffering from vomiting disorders, refuse to go to therapy. In such cases, it is sometimes sufficient to start the therapy by carrying out an indirect intervention through close relatives.
Vomiting syndrome - Bulimia Nervosa:
Often patients with bulimic or anorexic tendencies discover that vomiting enables them to control their weight without having to give up the pleasure of eating.
Scientific literature still classifies vomiting disorder as a variant of anorexia and bulimia nervosa, nevertheless our empirical research has shown that vomiting disorder is based on a completely different structure and model of functioning.
Although bulimia (binging and gaining weight) and anorexia (abstaining from food in order to lose weight) form the basic matrix of vomiting disorder, when the latter takes over it loses all connections with the disorder that initially produced it (anorexia).
This revolutionary discovery has offered brief strategic therapy important operative information to design adequate instruments that follow the same logic of this disorder, leading to a more effective and efficient treatment.