I have been doing a lot of thinking over the last week about how I can be most helpful to families that are struggling with a child who is diagnosed with the illness of anorexia. On this blog, I have begun to share my treatment approach, one that incorporates evidence based approaches offered within a framework of compassion and understanding. Over the last several entries, I shared the development of my current approach and where I have landed in my current thinking. However, I am always left with the feeling that I am not expressing myself as well as I would like to. You see, my thoughts about this disease spread beyond my ideas of how to treat it. It really begins with my thoughts on what it is. I learned in my training a long time ago that an accurate assessment drives an accurate treatment. But in this field, the lack of consensus of a clear understanding of what anorexia is daunting. How can we ever agree on how to treat it if we can’t even have a universal dialogue about what it is?

I have decided that part of my “mission” in this social media world is to try and bring some consensus to the field. This is a completely overwhelming task and I really sit here with no clear idea on how to even start such an undertaking on a large scale. However, I can start small…very small. And so my idea for #beedinformed was born. I am going to share my thoughts about what this disease is on facebook, twitter, and any other social media that I am part of. My sincere hope is that other professionals join in and share other pieces of relevant, current thinking about this disease. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if families could find this place as well? A place they could learn to trust as “the truth” about this disease. A place they would find first, instead of last.

My intention is to try and teach people what I see every day, all the time, in my office. The truth about the illness – its origins, its effects, and most importantly what things make it smaller and what things make it bigger. Things that families can do and things that therapists can do to extinguish it. I want to convey  my sense of responsibility to the families and to my colleagues. I truly understand this disease, even though I have never had it myself. I experience it all the time, from the inside out and have exclusively been “swimming in it” for the last 16 years of my professional life. I have absorbed this important information. I have been a diligent student.  And I am motivated to pass on this intimate knowledge of the illness to cause its demise, once and for all.