But awareness of that concept grew slowly.

People didn’t stop laughing at drunk acts like Dean Martin and Foster Brooks until after Betty Ford opened her chemical dependency treatment center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in 1982.

Ford, who died Friday at age 93, helped create a new sobering reality for America by lending her name, energy and experience as a recovering addict to the center.

“The fact that Betty Ford lent her name to the center had a profound effect on the treatment of alcoholism,” said Dr. James West, a medical director at the Betty Ford Center from its opening until his April 2007 retirement.

“When she made it clear that she was the head of this place and a recovering person herself, that had a very profound effect on the whole system throughout the country.”

Ford embraced the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymousprogram while being treated at the Long Beach Naval Hospital’s Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Service in 1978.

The Navy pioneered alcohol and drug treatment when it discovered its sailors were abusing drugs during theVietnam War.

“The leader of the whole thing was a (chief of naval operations) named Adm. Elmo Zumwalt,” said retired Rear Adm. Bill Narva, a physician who became anEisenhower Medical Center and Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center board member.

“He was interested in people and personnel and women and minorities, and the use of drugs and alcohol on the ships.

“I was his staff medical officer, and went through that with him in ’70-’74. There was a medical officer in Long Beach who had a clinic on one of the piers. Zumwalt said, ‘Put the damn thing in the hospital.’ That’s how it all began at Long Beach.”

Ford was admitted to the hospital’s treatment center after her daughter, Susan, told their mutual gynecologist, Dr. Joseph Cruse, her mother had a drug and alcohol problem.

Cruse was a recovering alcoholic who worked with addicted teens at a Desert Hot Springs facility called Turnoff. He contacted Dr. Joe Pursch of the Long Beach Naval Hospital, and they planned an intervention with Ford’s family. Pursch arranged for her to be detoxed in at home before being admitted to the Navy hospital as the spouse of a commander-in-chief.

Her hospital stay required rooming with three other recovering alcoholics, with no special treatment. Then she was released to an AA program. Her sponsor was the late Meri Bell, who received an acknowledgement in Ford’s book, “Betty: A Glad Awakening.”

Ford was encouraged to help other drug and alcohol addicts as part of her therapy, but Bell’s husband, the late Del Sharbutt, Eisenhower board President John Sinn and Chairwoman Dolores Hope sought to integrally involve the Fords in their medical center.

“After she got out of treatment,” Sharbutt told The Desert Sun in the 1990s, “Dolores called her and said, ‘You’re the new kid on the block. Do you see anything around here that we’re not doing that we ought to be doing?’

Read the full article at USATODAY.

“I was overweight and made fun of for most of my life. Relentlessly,” said the Fairfield County teen. “But then I became extremely obsessive.”

He dropped more than 100 pounds in six months. He began to eliminate many foods from his diet, eating almost no fat. At his lowest point, he ate about 700 calories a day and exercised at least three hours.

He felt that he couldn’t stop.

Whitehead was 16 when a doctor diagnosed anorexia. At one point, the 5-foot 9-inch teen had shrunk to 120 pounds.

He now is 18 and a senior at Amanda-Clearcreek High School. He has been through two inpatient-care programs and continues to get care at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. His weight is up to about 180 pounds, and he’s on medication that helps ease the obsessive-compulsive disorder that helped fuel his illness.

Whitehead is troubled by advertising that depicts young men who are impossibly thin and yet still have muscles. Images such as that contribute to the disorder by encouraging people to attain an impossible physique, to seek “perfection,” he said.

And he’s adamant that people, including doctors, should be better at recognizing eating disorders in boys and men. Initially, he said, doctors “were like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a guy, you can’t have an eating disorder.’

“I think that society really needs to know that this is not just a female problem.”

A population-based study published in 2007 found that men and boys were one-third as likely as women to have anorexia or bulimia and more than half as likely to have a binge-eating disorder.

“I think it’s still viewed as a predominantly female disorder, and I think that’s going to be a hard thing to change,” said Dr. Terry Bravender, chief of adolescent medicine at Children’s.

There are many obstacles, including doctors who don’t recognize it and patients and families who resist getting help, he said. “I’ve seen boys and young men embarrassed to come in because they think they have a girls’ disorder. And I think a lot of times boys have to be really impaired to be identified as having an eating disorder.”

In male patients, problems typically arise a little differently, he said. They often start to eat healthier and exercise more in hopes of building muscle. Then other mental illnesses – including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and anxiety – lead to development of the disease.

Anorexia and bulimia can lead to osteoporosis, heart problems and, in the most extreme cases, death.

Read the full article at The Columbus Dispatch.

Vic had a deadly disease. And he says the world was a scary place when he was diagnosed with anorexia five years ago.

“I was very resistant to that. I was like how can this be possible, this doesn’t happen to guys,” he said.

But it does. And the National Eating Disorders Association or NEDA says it’s getting worse. A recent study shows that over a 7 year period, there was an 18% increase in hospitalizations for eating disorders.

“Among that increase, 37% of those hospitalized were men,” said Lynn Grefe, President and CEO of NEDA.

The big question is why and how come we aren’t hearing about it?

The pressure to be tough kept Vic quiet for a while.

Grefe says that one of the things fueling that 37% increase, is men who don’t know where go for help.

“Eating disorders are biologically based illnesses,” said Grefe. “People have a variety of characteristics that all come together like a perfect storm.”

“I started to look for other men in my situation and I couldn’t find any. Then I was like wow I must be broken,” said Vic.

But now he is hoping to help other men break their silence too. Sharing his insight with us at NEDA in New York City.

“There is a lot of pressure on guys to act a certain way, look a certain way,” said Vic. “I could never fit that mold.”

“I was heavy growing up, I had a lot of peer bullying, I was bullied for a great period of my life. That contributed to really negative feelings about my body,” said Vic. “I turned to food to comfort myself. It was a vicious cycle, I’d go to the food, eat a lot feel comfort, then it made me heavier and I hated it and hated myself for it.”

His eating disorder began when he started starving his emotions instead.

“I wanted the number to go lower, lower, lower,” he said “I was doing a fade diet, I didn’t research anything.”

He became obsessed with cutting calories while burning as many as he could.

“I pushed through it no matter how hard it was, how badly it hurt,” said Vic.

Everything came to a head when he decided to hospitalize himself.

“They were there to wake me up at 6 am to check my pulse and my blood pressure and make sure I wasn’t passing away,” said Vic.

There, he met other men with eating disorders too. That helped, as he made a commitment to get better.

“I’ve never taken a step backward since leaving the hospital. It’s either taking a step forward or staying where I am,” said Vic.

Siena head trainer Daniel Taylor works to combat eating disorders by educating his athletes about health, not weight or size.

He says the obsession isn’t always about getting smaller. Sometimes it’s all about getting big.

“They see themselves as being smaller when they really are getting bigger and bigger. The problem becomes that they work out too much, they work out too, hard which can cause health problem,” said Taylor.

It’s called body dysmorphia or adonis syndrome. And because it seems like the guy thing to do, NEDA and Taylor say it’s going ignored for too long.

“We’re talking about guys working out so it probably isn’t held the same way in society and it should be,” he said.

Experts say it’s an issue thats only being accelerated by images in the media and advertising that portrays skinny and muscular as the desired body type.

“Young guys they are reading these magazine telling them to do this, this and this and it’s either not real or it’s unattainable,” said Taylor.

Read the full article at Fox23 News.

The new approach uses injected vaccines to block some addictive substances from reaching the brain. If a vaccinated addict on the path to recovery slips and indulges in a drug, such as tobacco or cocaine, no pleasure will result.

“You still have to mentally say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to do this,’ but it’s so much easier to say it when you know if you light a cigarette, you’re not going to get any pleasure out of it,” says Stephen Ballou, a 56-year-old banker who got a nicotine vaccine in a 2007 clinical trial to help kick his pack-a-day habit. He says he hasn’t smoked since.

Some medications currently available to treat addictions typically work by mimicking a drug in the brain. For example, methadone stands in for heroin and the nicotine patch for cigarettes. Other medications block activity in the brain’s reward system. Alkermes Inc.’s once-monthly Vivitrol injection does this for alcoholics and opioid addicts, while PfizerInc.’s Chantix pills block the brain’s pleasure receptors activated when people smoke.

Small-molecule drugs like Chantix that function inside the brain can raise safety concerns. Chantix carries a federally mandated warning to users of possible depression and suicidal thoughts. A spokesman for Pfizer notes that no causal link between Chantix and such symptoms has been made.

By contrast, addiction-treatment vaccines work in the bloodstream, not the brain. Clinical trials have so far revealed no significant side effects, though the vaccines would do nothing to combat cravings. They work by tricking the body to reject drugs as if they are foreign pathogens. Normally, tiny drug molecules wend their way through the bloodstream to the brain, unleashing a flood of chemicals involved with pleasure and gratification. The drug molecules are too small to goad the immune system into generating antibodies to fight them off.

Scientists have figured out how to attach molecules similar to addictive drugs to much bigger antigens, such as deactivated versions of cholera or the common cold. When injected, these so-called conjugate vaccines spur the immune system to create antibodies to fight the tiny, addictive-drug molecules. These antibodies have in several studies glommed on to molecules of nicotine, cocaine and heroin ingested by lab animals and in some cases people, blocking them from triggering the pleasure centers in the brain.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.

Unlike other girls, she discovered that she possessed a powerful weight-loss gimmick, a secret reward for being diagnosed at age 10 with her detested disease, type 1 diabetes.

“When I was 14, I realized that by not taking my insulin, I could eat anything I wanted and lose weight,” recalls Akers, now 21, of Seattle. “For an overweight kid, that’s like a dream come true. I lost 55 pounds that summer. I thought I was a genius. I thought no one else knew about this.”

Akers spent the next six years in and out of hospitals, recovering from the life-threatening complications of skipping her insulin shots, before confronting the fact that she had an eating disorder. In 2008, she underwent intensive therapy, then set up an online nonprofit group to help women like her.

She is part of a recent wave of attention, activism, and research focused on type 1 diabetics who restrict their insulin for weight control.

The ranks of these complex patients are growing, according to eating-disorders treatment programs such as the Renfrew Center of Philadelphia. Yet recognition and understanding of their pathological pursuit of thinness remain sketchy.

In fact, there was no formal name for the dual diagnosis until three years ago, when an international group recommended “Eating Disorders-Diabetes Mellitus Type 1.”

Patients and the media have embraced a catchier label: diabulimia.

“Clinicians have qualms about using that term because it’s a media” invention, said Ann Goebel-Fabbri, a clinical psychologist and eating-disorders specialist at the Joslin Diabetes Center, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. “But it has given voice to a lot of women who are struggling with this, and now realize they aren’t alone.”

Type 1 diabetics, typically diagnosed in childhood or adolescence, can’t make insulin, the hormone that cells need to convert sugar from carbohydrate foods into energy.

Without insulin, the body effectively goes into a state of speeded-up starvation, dumping unused sugar into the urine and breaking down muscle, fat, and liver cells for fuel. This process produces acids called ketones, which build up in the blood, leading to a metabolic crisis called diabetic ketoacidosis.

An infection such as the flu or an injury can accidentally set ketoacidosis. But diabulimics try to skate on the edge of it, strategically omitting insulin to purge calories and suppress appetite – and enduring the resulting thirst, frequent urination, dehydration, weakness, fatigue, racing heart, nausea, and vomiting.

Cumulatively, bouts of ketoacidosis can permanently damage the kidneys, liver, stomach, arteries, and nerves – especially nerves in the feet and eyes.

Like the well-known eating disorders anorexia (self-starvation) and bulimia (bingeing and purging by vomiting or laxative abuse), diabulimia involves a cycle of low self-esteem, struggle for control, fear, depression, shame, secrecy, deception, and guilt.

Yet doctors and parents may not recognize the psychological complexity, assuming instead that the diabetic is being “noncompliant” – neglecting or defying onerous dietary, blood-sugar monitoring, and insulin regimens. In fact, after reports of weight loss induced by insulin restriction first appeared in medical journals in the 1980s, diabetes experts disagreed about the implications.

“There was a huge debate: Is this an eating disorder or not?” recalled Goebel-Fabbri at the Joslin Center.

Since then, she and other researchers have found that young women with type 1 diabetes are more than twice as likely to develop an eating disorder as their nondiabetic peers. One study found 10 percent of teenage diabetic girls had eating disorders, compared with 4 percent of same-age girls without diabetes. (Researchers have found no clear association between type 2 diabetes and eating disorders, probably because disturbed eating behaviors usually begin many years before the onset of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity.)

Anecdotally, the number of diabulimics is growing.

The Renfrew Center’s residential treatment program on Spring Lane, for example, now admits a few dozen diabetics a year.

“When I started working at Renfrew seven years ago, we had maybe one diabetic a year. It was rare,” said Julie Dorfman, director of nutrition. “Now, we’ve created a special menu for them with the carbohydrates already counted.”

Medical director Susan Ice said diabetics were also a big factor behind an increase in the number of newly admitted Renfrew patients who had to be transferred to a hospital because they were critically ill.

“Twenty percent who come in for admission, we send to the ER right away or during the course of treatment,” she said. “Two years ago, just five percent” required such care.

Read the full article at Philly.com.

Previous studies have shown that antidepressants such as tricyclics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) generate new brain cells, but until now scientists had not been clear how they did it.

In a study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry that used Pfizer’s Zoloft and other antidepressants, researchers from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that the drugs regulate the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) — a key protein involved in the stress response.

The study also showed that all types of antidepressant are dependent on the GR to create new cells, the scientists said.

“Having identified the glucocorticoid receptor as a key player in making new brain cells, we will now be able to use this novel stem cell system to model psychiatric illnesses in the laboratory, test new compounds and develop much more effective, targeted antidepressant drugs,” said Christoph Anacker, a doctorate student at the IoP who led the study.

Depression is common, affecting some 121 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It is among the leading causes of disability worldwide and less than 25 percent of sufferers have access to effective treatments.

Recent studies have demonstrated that depressed patients show a reduction in a process called neurogenesis — the development of new brain cells. Researchers believe this reduced neurogenesis may contribute to the debilitating psychological symptoms of depression, such as low mood or impaired memory.

Anacker’s team used human hippocampal stem cells, the source of new cells in the human brain, to investigate the effects of antidepressants on brain cells in a lab dish.

They treated the cells with Zoloft, known generically as sertraline — an SSRI used to treat depression.

Read the full article at Reuters.

It was like crack, she said. Drugs and alcohol seemed messy but binging and purging offered that same high; the kind of high that would take away the self-hatred that constantly weighed her down.

For seven years, Armstrong’s bulimia was her deepest secret. And as a black woman, Armstrong said, carrying the stigma of an eating disorder was even worse.

“There is that shame of not being a strong black woman,” said Armstrong, a Los Angeles playwright and author of the book, “Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat.”

“People would ask me, ‘What, do you want to be white or something?’”

More than 10 million Americans suffer from some kind of eating disorder, and many of them are not white, young or female, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.

Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, executive director of the Oliver-Pyatt Centers in Florida, said that, at any given time, at least half of her patients are not what society typically thinks of someone having an eating disorder: people older then 40, mothers, men and minorities.

“Minorities, men and older people have an even more difficult time,” said Oliver-Pyatt, speaking on behalf of the National Eating Disorders Association. “It’s almost culturally accepted for a young white woman to have an eating disorder.”

“Many black women are coming from an environment where there is such little control,” Armstrong, 45, said. “Who has less control than poor minorities in this country? I’ve interviewed black women who have said, ‘All I have is my food. You’re not taking that away.’”

Correlation between Trauma and Eating Disorders

Armstrong was raped by her favorite uncle when she was 13. Already having lived in a fatherless household, Armstrong said, she didn’t feel worthy enough to come forward with the trauma.

Bulimic Woman Sought Help

“He was the one male I trusted,” Armstrong said. “My thoughts were, ‘If he didn’t think I was worthy, if he could rape me, then maybe I am not worth anything. Maybe I do lack value.’”

On the outside, Armstrong was driven and bright. She did well in school but the self-hatred owned her.

At 17, Armstrong discovered that food helped her cope with feelings of worthlessness.

“It’s like gambling,” she said. “You win a little something and you’re on this high. But, eventually, you need it more than it needs you. It turned on me.”

And for years, she continued to lose the gamble. But Armstrong said she would have rather been silent than go against the symbol of an archetypal strong black woman.

She was suicidal and seven years into the disease, she finally went in for treatment.

“If my whole life was going to be about throwing up and controlling food, I didn’t want to live anymore,” Armstrong said.

When she relapsed in her late 30s, she realized that she hadn’t dealt with the emotional heaviness of her eating disorder and her traumatic experience as a young girl.

But unlike in her younger years, after a few weeks into her relapse, she realized she needed someone to help her cope with the heaviness.

“When I recovered the second time, I had nothing to hide anymore,” said Armstrong, who now has a heart murmur because of the the bulimia. “I can safely say now that I’ll never throw up again. It doesn’t occur to me anymore. I have no desire. It used to be in the back of my mind but it just isn’t anymore.”

Eating Disorders in Older Women

Oliver-Pyatt said that many older female patients who come to her clinic actually did not fully recover from an eating disorder in their early years.

She said many of this subgroup of women had a bad experience while receiving treatment for their condition in their 20s and teens. And now, many of these women fly under the doctor’s radar for eating disorders.

Read the full article at ABC News.

“The prevalence of these disorders is higher than previously expected in this age range, and the patterns of [co-existing illnesses], role impairment and suicidality indicate that eating disorders represent a major public health concern,” the researchers wrote.

“This article aptly points out that we should not dismiss eating disorders as a public health problem simply because their prevalence is lower than some other major mental illnesses,” said Mary Tantillo, director of the Western New York Comprehensive Care Center for Eating Disorders and an associate professor of clinical nursing at the University of Rochester School of Nursing. “The magnitude of what happens because of eating disorders — severe mental and physical health complications, psychiatric illness and addictions, high mortality rates and the high cost of acute treatment — far outweighs their lower prevalence.”

“As the article states, eating disorders, as diseases of disconnection, can become chronic and can eventually kill due to the social impairment and isolation they create,” Tantillo said in a statement. “Despite loving families, friends and school personnel, afflicted teens can go months or years undetected due to the secrecy and shame surrounding the illness, and the ways in which the disease affects the brain and distorts how they perceive it. Timely diagnosis is often hindered by the inability of afflicted teens to recognize the need for help and/or ask for it. Clearly, when eating disorders in adolescents are not quickly identified and treated, there are great costs to the teen, his or her family and society.”

Led by Sonja A. Swanson, of the National Institute of Mental Health, the research team reported the findings online March 7 in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

To research the issue, the authors analyzed data collected by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement, which included the results of in-person interviews conducted with more than 10,000 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18.

The result: lifetime prevalence rates of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder and several other eating disorders ranged from less than half a percent of those interviewed to as much as 2.5 percent.

While boys and girls appeared to be equally susceptible to anorexia, girls were found to be more likely to develop bulimia and/or binge-eating disorders.

What’s more, the majority of those with any eating disorder were also burdened with at least one other mental health issue. This was the case, for example, with nearly nine in 10 bulimic adolescents, and more than eight in 10 of those with a binge-eating problem.

Read the full article at Businessweek.

Gen Komaki who led the ministry’s first full survey on the juvenile health problem said, “The number of potential sufferers could grow several-fold. The popular trend today that favors dieting could be endangering children.”

The survey found that 1.9 percent of girls and 0.2 percent of boys have eating disorders and are in need of therapy or advice from doctors who have expertise in both physical and mental health.

Students trying to lose weight often use laxatives, throw up food they have eaten, skip meals and work out excessively, according to the survey led by Komaki, senior researcher with the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry.

In contrast, 3.5 percent of girls and 1.3 percent of boys said they took to binge-eating eight times over four weeks or more often.

Female students with the disorder said they tend to stay up late at night or cannot enjoy eating with their families, that they are told by family members to get thinner or that nobody understands their feelings.

Read the full article at The Mainichi Daily News.

Because it’s considered a female issue there isn’t much acknowledgement of male bulimia, but Dave McKenzie of Rogersville, Tennessee and Bo Blaze of Hackensack decided to speak candidly about their struggles in order to let others know they are not alone.

McKenzie was a chubby kid who tried diets and nothing worked. He said, “My parents called me ‘garbage belly.’” During his sophomore year in high school, he thought he’d get girls if he was thinner so he started skipping meals. “One day it was like a light switch,” he said. “I’m not gonna eat. I developed the will power not to eat.”

The young McKenzie had it all figured out. His mom slept late, so he skipped breakfast. He started staying in school during lunch hour so he wouldn’t eat then either and his parents were none the wiser. He worked at a pizza parlor at night so he told his parents he’d eat there. But on the nights he didn’t work, his parents made him eat at the dinner table. He’d feed some of his meal to the dog and then go to the bathroom and make himself throw up.

By his college years he started binging too. His addictive habit of pigging out and throwing up happened as often as twice a day. McKenzie’s habit tapered off over the years, but as a middle-aged man he admits to still binging and purging once in a blue moon, usually during stressful times. He’s unsure if his habit caused him any serious health problems, but he does have problems with his throat. “I haven’t gone to the doctor,” he said, “I don’t have insurance.”

Bo Blaze started having problems in his late teens also. He said that nowadays people are more forgiving, but in the 1980s you had to look a certain way, everybody had to be fit. “A lot of people don’t realize men have the same social stigmas women do.”

Read the full article at Patch.com.

In the United States, according to the National Eating Disorders Association, between five and 10 million girls and women and one million boys and men struggle with eating disorders. And eating disorders have the unfortunate distinction of having the highest death rate of any mental illness — nearly 10 percent will die as a result of their eating disorder.

Of all eating disorders, Anorexia Nervosa is the most rare, affecting approximately 3 percent of all individuals struggling with eating disorders. The illness often has devastating effects on patients and their families. Many patients experience cardiac complications, hair loss, bone deterioration including osteoporosis, and loss of their periods.

Historically, Anorexia has been treated in inpatient and residential treatment facilities requiring patients to live away from their families for many weeks or months per treatment episode. Fifteen years ago, families were often vilified and blamed for causing their son or daughter’s illness. Treatment involved separating patients from their families because treatment providers believed that the parents had “failed” — that not only were the parents incapable of helping, but that they actually caused more harm.

For many families, this separation caused significant distress and disruption. And although treatment in inpatient or residential facilities is usually successful in restoring the patient’s weight, the rate of relapse once patients leave and return home is high often requiring multiple treatment episodes. Often, families were unprepared for how to continue to support their son or daughter once they were back in the “real world.”

The Changing Face of Treatment

Researchers have now found that for some patients suffering from anorexia the involvement of the families in the treatment process contributes to better outcomes (1), (2), (3). In addition, this treatment can often be done in an outpatient setting eliminating the need for patients to leave their families and live outside of the home.

Family Based Treatment, also known as the Maudsley Approach, is a specific type of treatment for anorexia for adolescents between ages 13 and 17 years. This approach utilizes the parents and family as active participants in the restoration of the patients’ weight and physical health (1). It also aims at preventing hospitalization of patients and assisting parents in restoring their child’s weight and returning him or her to normal adolescent development with no continuing eating disorder behaviors.

Outcome studies for Family Based Treatment have shown that for patients who have had anorexia for less than three years, approximately two thirds of adolescent patients are restored to a healthy weight. Impressively, five years later some 75 to 90 percent remain fully weight recovered (2). Research has also shown that most patients participating in a Family Based Treatment require on average no more than 20 treatment sessions over the course of six to 12 months (3).

What Families and Patients Can Expect

So often, patients and families have been told that “it’s not about the food.” In essence, there is still much truth to this statement. The simplest way to conceptualize an eating disorder is to think of it like a puzzle that has five pieces:

1. Genetics: Most individuals struggling with eating disorders have a family of anxiety and/or depression. In some studies, upwards of 70 percent of individuals with anorexia were identified as having an undiagnosed anxiety disorder dating from early childhood. The most common forms of anxiety were obsessive-compulsive disorder (or strong traits of OCD), social anxiety and social phobia.

2. Personality Traits: In the past five years, researchers in the field of eating disorders have begun to focus in on this underlying puzzle piece. Typical traits include people-pleasing, perfectionism, being highly driven, and harm or conflict avoidance. Often individuals and their families will note that their son or daughter had an extremely difficult time with change, conflict or making mistakes.

3. Trauma or Loss: This is often a misunderstood piece of the puzzle. Individuals with eating disorders usually have some degree of trauma or loss in their histories, but it can range from being picked on in school to severe emotional or sexual abuse. Not everyone experiences abuse, but because patients with eating disorders are often more sensitive and intuitive, the impact of these types of events resonates that much stronger for them.

Read the full article at the Huffington Post.

These shocking statistics are revealed in Lauren Stern’s new book “The Slender Trap: A Food and Body Workbook”. Stern’s book aims to help women and girls work through their issues with food and body image and lead them on the path to emotional wellbeing and features a series of writing and drawing exercises that guide readers through the therapeutic experience to help them assess how they feel about themselves and their bodies. The book also reveals that 9 percent of nine year olds have vomited to lose weight and 81 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat.

These statistics underline recent reports that the incidence of eating disorders amongst the primary school age group is increasing.

A study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2009 found that between July 2002 and June 2005, 101 five to 13-year-old children were newly diagnosed with an eating disorder. About two-thirds were affected by anorexia nervosa. The rest were experiencing “food avoidant emotional disorder” — a condition unique to children which involves extreme weight loss driven by high anxiety levels, rather than wanting to be thin.

Two-thirds of girls in year 1 believed that being thin would make them more popular. Even more believed weight gain would attract teasing.(i)

According to Dr. Murray Drummond of Flinders University in Australia, for boys these negative impressions are “associated with the drive for muscularity. Guys on the cover of male targeted health magazines are athletic and muscular, but devoid of hair — almost prepubescent, which has caused a problem in our changing cultural expectations.”

Material published on a psychology website confirms that by school-age, children often face prejudices based on their appearances. Children spend much of their early lives in schools, an environment that is highly social and competitive with notoriously rigid hierarchies often based on physical appearances. Studies have found that teachers are also drawn to the most attractive children, which can further compound a child’s poor body image. In a school-age child, a poor body image may result in social withdrawal and poor self-esteem.

And if primary school aged children develop a fixation on the way they look and a negative awareness about weight and size, these feelings can trigger self destructive thoughts and behaviours which can spiral into an eating disorder.

In my book Why Can’t I Look the Way I Want; Overcoming Eating Issues there is a chapter dedicated to triggers. For me personally, peer pressure and puberty led to feelings of inadequacy, and played a leading role in the onset of anorexia. Triggers can be situations, comments or events that bring up feelings of anxiety and worthlessness including family arguments related to eating (e.g. “you’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten everything on your plate”), feelings of being misunderstood, rejection by peers (e.g. “go away we don’t want to play with you”), or feeling like a misfit. Negative emotions can lead to unhealthy thought processes and feelings of insecurity.

I recently delivered a keynote to a wonderful group of educators of primary school aged children at the Life Education annual conference. I feel strongly that we need to target the primary school age group and engage them constructively in order to educate about positive body image to aid in fostering a positive self-image.

From an early age children are susceptible to the messages they receive and negative messages are in danger of being absorbed into their belief system. If we can be proactive at the primary school level, we have every chance of reducing the incidence of disordered eating at an early age, as well as when children grow into teenagers.

Read the full article at the Huffington Post.

As a result, millions could be exposed to side effects from the medicines without proven health benefits, said Jina Pagura, a psychologist and currently a medical student at the University of Manitoba in Canada, and colleagues who worked on the study.

“We cannot be sure that the risks and side effects of antidepressants are worth the benefit of taking them for people who do not meet criteria for major depression,” Pagura said in an e-mail to Reuters Health.

For the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Pagura and colleagues tapped into data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiologic Surveys, which include a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 U.S. adults interviewed between 2001 and 2003.

Roughly one in ten people told interviewers they had been taking antidepressants during the previous year, yet a quarter of those people had never been diagnosed with any of the conditions that doctors usually treat with the medications, such as major depression and anxiety disorder.

“These individuals are likely approaching their physicians with concerns that may be related to depression, and could include symptoms like trouble sleeping, poor mood, difficulties in relationships, etc,” Pagura said.

“Although an antidepressant might help with these issues, the problems may also go away on their own with time, or might be more amenable to counseling or psychotherapy.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly 15 million people in the United States suffer from major depression, and 40 million more have anxiety disorders.

Although the survey didn’t include all mental illnesses that might have led doctors to prescribe an antidepressant, other experts said the latest findings are not exaggerated.

“Reviews of claims records, which are diagnoses actually given by health care professionals, suggest that only about 50 percent of patients who are prescribed antidepressants receive a psychiatric diagnosis,” said Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York.

Read the full article at Reuters.

The experts urged the FDA not to ease restrictions on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for many patients. The agency is reviewing the safety of the treatment and could now require companies to prove to the government that their products are safe.

Electroconvulsive therapy involves the delivery of a series of electric shocks through the scalp to the brain. As many as 100,000 patients receive ECT each year in the U.S., mostly for severe depression or other disorders that do not respond tomedications.

ECT machines have escaped strict scrutiny by the FDA largely because they were already on the market when the agency tightened rules three decades ago. The treatment is widely viewed as effective for patients who have few other options. But concerns over long-term safety have prompted new attention from regulators.

ECT Side Effects

Of most concern to the FDA is the risk of cognitive side effects, like memory loss, especially after prolonged use of ECT. While most experts agree that the benefits of short-term ECT treatments outweigh the risks for severely depressed patients, few studies look at the effects past six months, experts said.

Members of the advisory panel on Friday urged the FDA not to reclassify ECT machines as generally safe for patients with several disorders, includingschizophrenia and schizophrenia-like disorders, bipolar mania, and catatonia — a mental state in which patients sometimes are in a stupor.

The panel split on whether the agency should ease restrictions on ECT for patients with severe depression. While ECT was viewed as largely effective, experts said they had little information on how to make it safer.

“I think the data is lacking on how we can better mitigate the risks,” said Jane Paulsen, PhD, a neuropsychology researcher at the University of Iowa.

If the FDA keeps its most restrictive “Class III” designation for ECT, companies would have to submit applications showing their machines are safe and effective. Those may be outdated or may not exist at all for many devices, prompting worries that some machines could be forced off the market.

Read the full article at WebMD.