Eating Disorders: Home

A comprehensive guide on how to diagnose, treat, and care for those with eating disorders. Eating disorders, which include such conditions as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and pica, represent a challenge to both patients and health care providers alike. For more than 20 years, health care providers have turned to the expert advice found in Eating Disorders to keep up to date with the latest research in the field and to help them provide the best care available for their patients. In this new, thoroughly revised and expanded edition of their best-selling work, Drs. Philip S. Mehler and Arnold E. Andersen provide a user-friendly and comprehensive guide to treating and managing eating disorders for primary care physicians, mental health professionals, worried family members and friends, and nonmedical professionals (such as teachers and coaches). Mehler and Andersen * identify common medical complications faced by people who have eating disorders * answer questions about how to treat both physical and behavioral aspects of eating disorders * discuss serious complications, including cardiac arrhythmia, electrolyte abnormalities, and gastrointestinal problems * incorporate all-new information on avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), binge eating disorder, and the role of social media in promoting disordered eating * offer targeted advice for working with specialists * include four new chapters on eating disorders in children and adolescents; atypical anorexia; eating disorders in transgender individuals; and family therapy * feature engaging clinical vignettes * answer a list of common questions practitioners may have in each chapter The most comprehensive work on the market and the only book that covers eating disorders in transgender individuals, Eating Disorders is a compassionate, evidence-based, and essential guide. Contributors: Arnold E. Andersen, Ovidio Bermudez, Jeana Cost, Meghan Foley, Dennis Gibson, Neville Golden, Sacha Gorell, Jeffrey Hollis, Mori J. Krantz, Daniel Le Grange, Russell Marx, Jennifer McBride, Philip S. Mehler, Leah Puckett, Katherine Sachs, Michael Spaulding-Barclay, Anna Tanner, Nathalia Trees, Jessica Tse, Kenneth Weiner, Patricia Westmoreland

While many people may reflexively imagine an anorexic or bulimia teenage girl upon being asked to think about eating disorders, eating disorders are a form of mental illness that can take many forms and affect individuals of all genders, ages, and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, an estimated eight million people in the United States struggle with an eating disorder, making eating disorders one of the most prevalent forms of mental illness in America. This two-volume encyclopedia comprehensively examines eating disorders as the forms they can take; their causes and potential complications; and how they can best be treated and prevented. It also examines the influence had by cultural factors such as the fashion industry, television and movies, and social media. More than just a simple A-to-Z reference, Eating Disorders: Understanding Causes, Controversies, and Treatment also includes valuable features such as Q&A interviews with those affected by and working to combat eating disorders, case studies, scholarly essays that voice opinions in key debates, and a directory of resources for individuals seeking help.

When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.   Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It's also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.